UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


UNWtKSITY  of  CALIFORNI> 

AJNGELES 
UbKAKY 


SCHOOL,  COLLEGE 
AND    CHARACTER 

By  LeBaron  Russell  Briggs 


BOSTON  AND   NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  AND  COMPANY 

rirtJcrsiDc  press,  Cambridge 
1902 


147238 


COPYRIGHT,    1901,    BY   LE  BARON    RUSSELL   BRIGGS 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 


Published  November,  igot 


Library 


TO  HARVARD  COLLEGE 

O  thou  whose  chastening  love  hath  taught 

Our  country's  chosen  youth, 
Thou  who  hast  led  a  nation's  thought 

In  freedom  and  in  truth, 
Mother  of  learning  and  of  grace, 
We  long  to  look  upon  thy  face, 
To  gather  all  that  now  we  deem 
Thine  own,  into  one  face  supreme  — 
The  nobly  living,  nobly  dead, 
The  glorious  sons  that  thou  hast  bred. 

Where,  leaping  to  the  trumpet's  call, 
Men  charge,  to  conquer  or  to  fall, 

And  count  not  death  a  loss ; 
Where  youth,  renouncing  wealth  and  fame, 
Follows,  through  pestilence  and  flame, 

The  Hero  of  the  Cross, 
Or  renders,  faithful  to  his  trust, 
The  silent  service  of  the  just, 

We  know  thy  sons  and  thee. 


iv    TO    HARVARD    COLLEGE 

Thine  is  the  burning  heart  of  youth ; 
Thine  is  the  steadfast  flame  of  'years ; 
Thine  is  the  wisdom  of  the  truth, 

That  falters  not  nor  fears  s 
Thine  is  the  strong  and  solemn  glow, 
Thine  is  the  sweet  transcendent  grace, 
Of  her  whose  love,  through  weal  or  woe, 

Lights  her  transfigured  face. 
Where  hope  is  high  and  thought  is  free, 
Where  life  is  brave  and  death  is  true, 
Where  duty  unrelenting  leads 
To  tasks  of  pain  forever  new 
The  heart  that  triumphs  while  it  bleeds, 

Mother,  thy  face  we  see. 


PREFACE 

OF  the  essays  collected  in  this  volume, 
four  have  been  printed  in  the  "Atlantic 
Monthly"  and  one  has  appeared  in  the 

g§        Proceedings  of  two  educational  associa- 
tions.    The  dedicatory  verses  have  been 
printed  in  the  "  Harvard  Monthly." 
The  book  does  not  profess  unity  or 

pc  completeness.  It  is  not  a  full  orchestra, 
but  a  harp  with  two  strings,  which  the 
harper  twangs  as  long  as  he  thinks  the 
audience  will  put  up  with  him.  What- 

£•      ever  is  in  it  comes  out  of  human  expe- 

•6 

rience ;  and  this  is  its  justification,  if  it 
has  one.  That  it  is  not  the  work  of  an 
"educator"  may  be  inferred  from  the 
inquiry  of  a  distinguished  superintend- 


vi  PREFACE 

ent  of  schools  who,  after,  reading  "  Some 
Old-Fashioned  Doubts  about  New-Fash- 
ioned Education,"  asked  with  warmth 
who  the  editor  of  the  "Atlantic  Monthly" 
was  and  how  he  came  to  print  such 
nonsense.  One  thing  is  certain:  he 
who  writes  nonsense  about  education  is 

in  excellent  company. 

L.  B.   R.  BRIGGS. 

CAMBRIDGE,  MASS. 
November, 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.    FATHERS,  MOTHERS,  AND  FRESHMEN  .        I 
II.    SOME    OLD-FASHIONED   DOUBTS  ABOUT 

NEW-FASHIONED  EDUCATION  .      33 

III.  COLLEGE    HONOR  .  .  .      65 

IV.  SOME    ASPECTS    OF    GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 

TRAINING  .  .  .  .91 

V.    THE     TRANSITION     FROM    SCHOOL    TO 

COLLEGE    .  .  .  .  .    i»7 


SCHOOL,  COLLEGE,  AND 
CHARACTER 


FATHERS,  MOTHERS,  AND  FRESHMEN 

BY  virtue  of  the  authority  commit- 
ted to  me,"  says  President  Eliot 
on  Commencement  Day,  "  I  confer  on 
you  the  first  degree  in  Arts ;  and  to 
each  of  you  I  give  a  diploma  which 
admits  you,  as  youth  of  promise,  to  the 
fellowship  of  educated  men."  The  col- 
lege sends  her  alumni  into  the  world 
with  nothing  more  than  a  warrant  that 
they  are  presentable  intellectually.  Yet 
her  unwritten  and  unspoken  purpose  is 
not  so  much  intellectual  as  moral ;  and 
her  strongest  hope  is  to  stamp  her  gradu- 
ates with  an  abiding  character.  A  col- 
lege stands  for  learning,  for  culture,  and 
for  power ;  in  particular,  it  stands  for  the 


2         SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

recognition  of  an  aim  higher  than  money- 
getting.  It  is  a  place  where  our  young 
men  shall  see  visions ;  where  even  the 
idlest  and  lowest  man  of  all  must  catch 
glimpses  of  ideals  which,  if  he  could  see 
them  steadily,  would  transfigure  life. 
The  Bachelor  of  Arts  is  seldom,  on  his 
Commencement  Day,  a  scholar  either 
polished  or  profound ;  but  he  may  be  in 
the  full  sense  of  the  word  a  man. 

Though  the  responsibility  of  the  Alma 
Mater  for  the  manhood  of  her  sons  gets 
little  formal  recognition,  whoever  loves 
her  feels  it  none  the  less,  and  knows  that 
her  good  name  depends  not  so  much  on 
her  children's  contributions  to  learning 
as  on  their  courtesy,  their  efficiency,  their 
integrity,  and  their  courage.  The  college 
herself,  as  represented  by  her  governing 
bodies,  feels  this  deeply,  in  a  general  way, 
but  does  not  know  and  cannot  find  out 
how  far  her  responsibility  reaches  into 
details.  Intellectual  discipline  she  pro- 
fesses and  must  provide,  —  subjects  of 


AND   CHARACTER  3 

study  old  and  new ;  instructors  that  know 
their  subjects  and  can  teach  them :  and 
she  is  happy  if  she  has  money  enough  to 
make  these  things  sure.  Thus  beyond 
what  is  spent  for  the  chapel  and  for  the 
maintenance  of  decent  order  in  the  pre- 
mises there  can  be  little  visible  outlay  for 
the  protection  and  the  development  of  a 
student's  character.  Nor  can  the  forma- 
tion of  character,  except  as  affected  by 
courses  in  ethics,  be  measured  out  and 
paid  for  by  the  hour  or  by  the  job  ;  and 
thus  the  college  can  do  little  more  than 
trust  in  the  awakening  of  intellectual  in- 
terests to  drive  out  the  trivial  and  the 
base,  in  the  often  unconscious  influence 
of  men  of  character  among  its  Faculty, 
and  in  the  habits  and  standards  of  con- 
duct already  acquired  at  school  and  at 
home.  Now  and  then  a  college  teacher 
rejects  all  responsibility  outside  of  the 
classroom.  "  My  business,"  he  says,  "  is 
to  teach  men  :  if  the  students  are  not 
men,  I  don't  want  them  in  my  classes ; 


4        SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

if  they  don't  care  to  learn,  let  them  go 
their  own  way.  What  becomes  of  them 
is  no  business  of  mine ;  and  if  they  have 
to  leave  college,  so  much  the  better  for 
the  college  and  for  them.  The  first, 
last,  and  only  duty  of  a  teacher  in  a  uni- 
versity is  to  advance  the  knowledge  of 
his  subject ;  he  is  false  to  his  trust,  if  he 
spends  time  and  strength  in  patching  up 
worthless  boys  who  have  no  place  in  an 
institution  of  learning." 

This  doctrine,  seldom  enunciated  by 
men  that  have  sons  and  happily  never 
lived  down  to,  is  the  natural  refuge  of 
professors  who  see  the  opposition  between 
the  advancement  of  learning  and  concern 
for  their  pupils'  character,  and  who,  with 
the  enthusiasm  of  the  investigator  and 
the  teacher,  have  time  and  strength  for 
nothing  more.  Nor  is  the  professor  the 
only  interested  person  that  would  shift 
the  responsibility.  Those  parents  who 
have  turned  their  children  over  succes- 
sively to  the  governess,  the  little  boys' 


AND   CHARACTER  5 

school,  and  the  big  boys'  school,  turn 
them  over  in  time  to  the  college.  The 
college,  they  admit,  has  its  dangers ;  yet 
it  is  the  only  thing  for  a  gentleman's 
sons  at  a  certain  time  in  their  lives,  and 
the  risk  must .  be  taken.  The  business 
of  the  college  they  patronize  is,  like  the 
business  of  the  schools  they  have  patron- 
ized, to  develop,  cultivate,  and  protect 
their  sons,  whom,  to  put  it  in  their  own 
language,  they  "  confide  "  to  the  college 
for  that  purpose.  "  I  sent  my  boy  to 
college,"  writes  the  mother  of  a  lazy 
little  Freshman  that  has  come  to  grief, 
"and  I  supposed  he  would  be  looked 
out  for."  "  Write  me  a  good  long  letter 
about  my  Darling,"  says  another.  "  I 
want  my  boy  to  be  up  and  washed  at 
eight,"  says  a  careful  father.  "  Please 
send  me  every  week  an  exact  record  of 
my  son's  absences,"  a  suspicious  father 
writes  to  the  dean,  —  and  the  dean  won- 
ders what  would  become  of  himself,  his 
stenographer,  and  his  ostensible  duties 


6        SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

if  all  parents  should  ask  for  consideration 
on  this  same  scale. 

"  Some  things  are  of  that  nature  as  to  make 
One's  fancy  chuckle,  while  his  heart  doth  ache  ;  " 

and  often  such  appeals  as  I  have  cited, 
though  superficially  amusing,  belong  to 
the  sad  phenomena  of  the  college  world ; 
for  they  imply  parental  distrust  at  the 
very  time  when  a  youth,  just  entering 
the  larger  life  and  the  fiercer  temptations 
of  early  manhood,  needs,  beyond  all  other 
human  helps,  a  relation  with  father  and 
mother  of  long-tried  and  perfect  trust. 
They  imply,  also,  parents'  ignorance  of 
children's  character. 

To  the  dean  of  a  large  college,  who 
has  most  to  do  with  students  and  their 
parents  in  all  academic  sorrows,  it  soon 
becomes  clear  that  parents  are  account- 
able for  more  undergraduate  shortcom- 
ings than  they  or  their  sons  suspect,  — 
and  this  after  liberal  allowance  for  faults 
in  the  college  and  its  officers.  "  I  have 


AND   CHARACTER  7 

spent  an  hour  today  with  Jones's  father," 
said  a  college  president  in  a  formidable 
case  of  discipline.  "  I  have  conceived  a 
better  opinion  of  the  son  after  meeting 
the  father,"  —  and  the  experience  is  re- 
peated year  by  year.  Five  minutes,  or 
two  minutes,  with  a  father  or  a  mother 
may  reveal  the  chief  secret  of  a  young 
man's  failure  or  misconduct,  and  may 
fill  the  heart  of  an  administrative  officer 
with  infinite  compassion.  "  You  say  he 
gambles,"  says  a  loud,  swaggering  father. 
"  Well,  what  of  it  ?  Gentlemen  always 
play  cards."  "  I  told  my  boy,"  says  a 
father  of  a  different  stamp,  "  that  I  did 
not  myself  believe  in  [what  is  commonly 
called  "  vice  "]  ;  but  that  if  he  went  into 
that  sort  of  thing,  he  must  not  go  off 
with  the  crowd,  but  must  do  it  quietly 
in  a  gentlemanly  way." 

Hereditary  and  home  influence  less 
palpable,  but  quite  as  pervasive  and  nearly 
as  demoralizing,  is  that  of  the  trivially 
biographic  mother,  who,  while  a  dozen 


8        SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

men  are  waiting  at  the  dean's  office  door, 
assures  the  dean  that  her  son,  now  on 
trial  for  his  academic  life,  "  was  a  lovely 
baby,"  and  who,  so  to  speak,  grows  up 
with  him  then  and  there,  tracking  him 
step  by  step,  with  frequent  counter- 
marches, to  his  present  station  ;  or  of 
the  mother  who  insinuates  that  the  father 
(whose  ambassador  she  is)  has  been  less 
competent  and  wise  than  she,  and  that 
her  son  gets  from  the  father's  family 
offensive  traits  which  she  hopes  will  be 
kept  under  by  the  sterling  merits  that 
he  gets  from  her  own ;  or  of  the  father 
who  is  tickled  by  the  reminiscences  of 
his  own  youth  that  are  evoked  when  his 
son  is  caught  stealing  a  poor  shopkeep- 
er's sign ;  or  of  the  father  who  suggests 
that  the  college  should  employ  at  his 
expense  a  detective  against  his  son ;  or 
of  the  father  who,  when  his  son  is  sus- 
pended from  the  university,  keeps  him 
in  a  neighboring  city,  at  any  cost  and 
with  any  risk  and  with  any  amount  of 


AND    CHARACTER  9 

prevarication,  rather  than  take  him  home 
and  let  the  neighbors  suspect  the  truth ; 
or  of  the  father  who  at  a  crucial  moment 
in  the  life  of  a  wayward  son  goes  to  Eu- 
rope for  pleasure  (though,  to  do  him 
justice,  he  has  been  of  little  use  at  home) ; 
or  of  the  father  who  argues  that  his  son's 
love  of  drink  cannot  be  hereditary,  since 
he  himself  had  straightened  out  before 
his  son  was  born. 

The  best  safeguard  of  a  young  man 
in  college  —  better  even  than  being  in 
love  with  the  right  kind  of  girl  —  is  a 
perfectly  open  and  affectionate  relation 
to  both  parents,  or  to  the  one  parent  or 
guardian  that  represents  both.  In  saying 
this,  I  presuppose  parents  and  guardians 
of  decent  character,  and  capable  of  open 
and  affectionate  relations.  One  of  the 
surprises  in  administrative  life  at  college 
is  the  underhand  dealing  of  parents,  not 
merely  with  college  officers,  but  with 
their  own  sons.  "  Your  son's  case  is  just 
where  I  cannot  tell  whether  or  no  it  will 


io      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

be  wise  to  put  him  on  probation,"  says 
the  dean  to  a  well-educated  and  agreeable 
father.  "  It  will  do  him  good,"  says  the 
father  emphatically.  "Then,"  says  the 
dean,  "  we  will  put  him  on ; "  and  the 
father,  as  he  takes  his  leave,  observes, 
"  I  shall  give  him  to  understand  that  it 
was  inevitable,  —  that  /  did  all  /  could 
to  prevent  it."  Now  and  then  a  father 
writes  to  the  dean  for  an  opinion  of  a 
son's  work  and  character.  The  dean 
would  like  to  tell  the  son  of  the  inquiry 
and  to  show  him  the  answer  before  send- 
ing it,  so  that  everything,  favorable  or 
unfavorable,  may  be  aboveboard ;  but  he 
has,  or  thinks  he  has,  the  father's  con- 
fidence to  keep.  Accordingly  he  says 
nothing  to  the  student  concerned,  answers 
the  father  straightforwardly,  and  learns 
later  that  his  letter,  if  unfavorable,  has 
passed  from  the  father  to  the  son  without 
comment,  as  if  it  had  been  a  gratuitous 
emanation  from  the  dean's  office.  The 
letter  may  be  garbled.  In  answer  to  the 


AND   CHARACTER         n 

inquiry  of  a  distinguished  man  about  his 
ward,  the  dean  of  a  college  made  clear, 
first,  that  the  young  man  had  been  in 
danger  of  losing  his  degree,  and  next 
that  the  danger  was  probably  over.  The 
distinguished  man  had  the  unfavorable 
part  of  the  letter  copied,  omitted  the  fa- 
vorable, and  sent  the  partial  copy  to  the 
student.  He  omitted  the  dean's  signa- 
ture :  but  the  letter  itself  showed  whence 
it  came ;  and  it  appeared  to  have  been 
written  just  after  the  dean  had  assured 
the  student  of  his  belief  that  the  degree 
was  safe.  The  young  man  was  frank 
enough  and  sensible  enough  in  his  per- 
plexity to  go  straight  to  the  dean ;  but 
the  false  position  of  the  distinguished 
man  and  the  false  position  in  which  (to 
some  degree  unwittingly)  he  would  have 
left  the  dean  before  the  student  are  clear. 
It  is  absolutely  essential  to  successful 
college  government  that  executive  offi- 
cers should  be  square  rather  than  "  poli- 
tic," and  should  be  outspoken,  so  far  as 


12       SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

they  can  be  without  breaking  anybody's 
confidence.  At  best,  it  is  scarcely  possible 
to  make  the  younger  students  see  that 
the  main  purpose  of  a  disciplinary  officer 
is  not  the  detection  of  wrongdoers,  by 
fair  means  or  by  foul ;  and  it  is  quite  im- 
possible for  such  an  officer  to  be  above 
suspicion  in  the  eyes  of  students  while 
parents  assume  that  he  is  either  a  partner 
or  a  rival  in  disingenuous  dealing. 

Sometimes  father  and  son  combine  to 
keep  a  mother  in  ignorance;  and  fre- 
quently that  great  principle  of  parental 
relation  —  that  father  or  mother  will  for- 
give all  and  will  love  in  spite  of  all,  but 
will  be  most  deeply  wounded  unless 
trusted  —  is  not  recognized  by  one  par- 
ent toward  another,  or  by  the  son  toward 
either.  In  cases  of  almost  total  want  of 
previous  acquaintance,  cases  of  parents 
who  complain  of  vacation  at  boarding- 
school  because  it  leaves  their  children 
on  their  hands,  this  is  not  to  be  wondered 
at ;  but  in  the  everyday  father,  willing 


AND   CHARACTER         13 

to  give  his  children  the  best  of  all  he  has, 
a  profound  ignorance  of  his  son's  acts, 
motives,  and  character  must  be  rooted  in 
some  deep  mistake,  not  of  heart,  but  of 
judgment.  That  such  ignorance  exists 
is  plain :  it  attributes  truth  to  the  tricky, 
sobriety  to  the  vinous,  and  chastity  to 
the  wanton.  Its  existence  is  further  con- 
firmed by  the  attitude  of  these  misap- 
prehended sons  when  no  argument  can 
persuade  them  to  be  the  first  messengers, 
to  father  or  mother,  of  their  own  trans- 
gression. "  Your  father  must  know  this 
from  me ;  but  he  has  a  right  to  know  it 
first  from  you.  You  say  you  cannot  give 
him  pain ;  but  nothing  will  help  him  so 
much  in  bearing  the  pain  that  must  be 
his  as  the  knowledge  that  you  yourself 
can  tell  him  all.  Before  I  write  to  him 
or  see  him,  I  will  give  you  time ;  and 
I  beg  you  to  tell  him  :  you  cannot  help 
him  more  now  than  by  going  to  him,  or 
hurt  him  more  than  by  avoiding  him. 
This  I  know  if  I  know  anything :  it  is 


i4       SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

not  mere  theory ;  it  is  based  on  what  I 
have  seen  of  many  fathers  and  of  many 
sons."  Yet  often  the  student,  especially 
the  young  student,  still  keeps  clear  of 
his  father  as  long  as  he  can. 

This  want  of  filial  courage  at  criti- 
cal moments  must  be  accounted  for  by 
a  false  reticence  in  those  early  years 
in  which  affectionate  freedom  between 
father  or  mother  and  son  must  begin. 
Unhappily  it  is  fostered  by  literature. 
Even  Thackeray,  whose  total  influence 
is  honest  and  clean,  seems,  when  he 
writes  of  college  life,  to  have  in  mind 
such  general  propositions  as  that  young 
men  always  run  into  debt  and  seldom 
make  all  their  debts  known  at  home ; 
that  all  normal  young  men  live  more  or 
less  wantonly ;  that  only  girls  (whose  in- 
tellects are  seldom  strong)  are  pure  in 
heart  and  life,  and  that  their  purity  is 
a  kind  of  innocence  born  of  blindness 
and  of  shelter  from  the  world ;  that  no 
mother  knows  the  morbid  unrest  which 


AND   CHARACTER         15 

is  stirring  in  her  sweet-faced  little  boy. 
Pendennis,  Philip,  the  Poems  —  all  fur- 
nish marked  instances  of  Thackeray's 
attitude  toward  the  exuberant  folly  and 
sin  of  young  men  ;  and  his  notion  of  a 
man's  standard  in  things  moral  is  re- 
vealed by  his  remark  that  "  no  writer  of 
fiction  among  us  has  been  permitted  to 
depict  to  his  utmost  power  a  man,"  since 
the  author  of  Tom  Jones. 

Thackeray  is  only  too  near  the  truth. 
The  earliest  important  cause  of  reticence 
between  parent  and  child,  the  longest 
continued,  the  fiercest,  and  the  most 
morbidly  silent  temptation,  the  tempta- 
tion most  likely  to  scorch  and  blight  a 
whole  life  and  the  lives  of  those  who 
come  after,  the  temptation  most  likely 
to  lead  through  passion  to  reckless  self- 
ishness, and  through  shame  to  reckless 
lying,  is  the  manifold  temptation  in  the 
mysterious  relation  of  sex  to  sex.  No 
subject  needs,  for  the  health  of  our  sons 
and  for  the  protection  of  our  daughters, 


16        SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

to  be  brought  earlier  out  of  the  region 
of  alluring  and  forbidden  exploration 
into  the  light  of  wholesome  truth  —  out 
of  the  category  of  the  unspeakable  into 
the  category  of  things  which,  though 
talked  of  seldom,  may  be  talked  of  freely 
between  father  or  mother  and  son. 
Temptation,  passion,  will  exist  always ; 
but  temptation  and  passion  which  must 
be  nursed  or  suppressed  in  secret  are 
far  more  insidious,  far  less  conquerable. 
Moreover,  temptation  and  passion,  when 
confided  to  a  father  or  a  mother  by  a 
son  who  is  struggling  to  do  right,  lose 
half  their  danger:  the  strength  of  those 
nearest  and  dearest  buoys  up  our  own ; 
and  the  fear  of  confessing  a  sin  —  a  false 
fear  when  once  the  sin  is  committed  — 
may  be  wholesome  as  a  safeguard.  No 
parent  can  begin  to  be  in  a  frank  relation 
to  his  son  if  he  has  left  that  son  to  pick 
up  in  the  street  and  in  the  newspaper  all 
his  knowledge  of  the  laws  to  which  he 
owes  his  life ;  yet,  as  things  stand,  this 


AND   CHARACTER         17 

most  vital  of  all  subjects  is  often  the  one 
subject  about  which  a  young  man  shrinks 
from  talking  with  any  but  contempora- 
ries as  ignorant  as  himself,  a  subject  kept 
in  the  dark,  except  for  coarse  jokes  at 
the  theatre  or  at  convivial  gatherings  of 
boys  and  men. 

Almost  equally  important  with  an  un- 
derstanding between  parent  and  son  is 
an  understanding  between  every  student 
and  at  least  one  college  officer.  There 
must  be  some  one  on  the  spot  to  whom 
the  student  may  talk  freely  and  fully 
about  such  perplexities  as  beset  every 
young  man  in  a  new  life  away  from 
home.  Even  a  college-bred  father  is 
college-bred  in  another  generation,  and 
cannot  know  those  local  and  temporal 
characteristics  of  a  college  on  the  mas- 
tery of  which  depends  so  large  a  measure 
of  the  student's  happiness.  Besides,  a 
father  may  not  be  promptly  accessible, 
whereas  every  good  college  has  at  hand 
many  officers  whose  best  satisfaction  lies 


i8      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

in  giving  freely  of  their  time  and  strength 
to  less  experienced  men  that  trust  them. 
Some  confidences,  no  doubt,  a  college 
officer  cannot  accept ;  but  even  in  a  case 
of  grave  wrongdoing,  if  the  relation  be- 
tween him  and  the  student  is  on  both 
sides  clearly  understood,  a  full  confes- 
sion, the  only  honorable  course,  is  usu- 
ally, in  the  long  run,  the  only  prudent 
course  also.  At  Harvard  College  the 
relation  between  a  Freshman  and  his 
"  adviser "  is  much  what  the  Freshman 
makes  it;  for  the  adviser  feels  an  older 
man's  diffidence  about  forcing  his  friend- 
ship on  defenceless  youth :  but  it  may  be 
made  of  high  and  permanent  value.  So 
may  the  relation  between  a  student  and 
any  worthy  college  teacher  whom  the 
student,  because  he  has  seen  in  him  some- 
thing to  inspire  confidence,  has  chosen 
for  a  counsellor.  Here,  too,  a  father  inti- 
mate with  his  son  may  help  him  to  over- 
come shyness,  and  to  make  use  of  that 
disinterested  friendship  of  older  men 


AND   CHARACTER          19 

which  is  one  of  the  best  opportunities  of 
college  life  and  is  often  thrown  away. 

By  fostering  these  friendships  and  in- 
fluences, by  interesting  himself  in  every 
detail  of  a  son's  career,  a  father  may  do 
much.  A  mother  may  often  do  more, 
by  establishing  her  son  in  the  friendship 
of  good  women.  This  is  partly  a  mat- 
ter of  social  influence,  no  doubt ;  a  poor 
and  ignorant  woman  a  thousand  miles 
away  may  not  see  how  she  can  effect  it ; 
may  shrink  from  an  appeal  to  the  un- 
known wives  of  unknown  professors  for 
friendly  greetings  to  her  boy :  but  many 
women  whose  sons  are  sent  to  a  college 
town  know,  or  have  friends  that  know, 
or  have  friends  who  have  friends  that 
know,  good  women  there.  The  friend- 
ship of  good  women  is,  as  everybody 
knows,  the  sweetest  and  most  wholesome 
corrective  of  loneliness  and  of  wander- 
ing desires.  A  boy  of  seventeen  or 
eighteen,  far  from  home  for  the  first 
time,  fresh  from  the  society  of  mother 


20      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

and  sisters  and  girl  friends,  may  be  ter- 
ribly lonely.  Near  any  college  he  will 
find  a  number  of  foolish  girls,  easy  of 
acquaintance,  proud  to  know  a  student, 
and  not  fastidious  about  conventionali- 
ties ;  girls  not  vicious  as  yet,  but  on  the 
unseen  road  to  vice ;  girls  whom  he  could 
not  comfortably  introduce  to  his  mother 
and  sisters,  but  who,  merely  as  girls,  are 
of  interest  to  him  in  the  absence  of  social 
and  intellectual  equals.  The  peril  of 
such  friendships  is  as  commonplace  as 
truth  and  as  undying :  reckless  giddiness 
on  one  side,  reckless  selfishness  half  dis- 
guised by  better  names  on  the  other,  the 
excitement  of  things  known  to  be  not 
quite  proper  but  not  clearly  recognized 
as  wrong,  have  led  to  one  kind  of  misery 
or  another,  so  long  as  men  have  been 
men  and  women  women.  Yet  these 
sorrows,  toward  which  men  move  at  first 
with  no  semblance  of  passion,  but  with 
mere  lonely  curiosity,  may  be  forestalled. 
Counsel  of  parents,  too  seldom  given  in 


AND   CHARACTER          21 

such  matters,  will  do  much ;  access  to 
home  life,  to  the  friendship  of  motherly 
mothers  and  of  modest,  sensible  daugh- 
ters, will  do  more.  Shy  and  awkward 
a  Freshman  may  be,  and  ridiculously 
afraid  of  speaking  with  women :  yet  the 
shyer  and  the  more  awkward  he  is,  the 
lonelier  he  is  —  the  more  in  need  of  see- 
ing the  inside  of  a  house  and  of  a  home ; 
the  more  likely  to  remember,  as  what 
made  his  first  college  year  supportable, 
some  few  days  in  which  a  good  woman 
who  used  to  know  his  mother  has  opened 
her  doors  to  him  as  to  a  human  being 
and  a  friend. 

After  all,  the  most  searching  test  of  a 
parent's  relation  to  his  son  in  college  is 
the  son's  own  view  of  the  purpose  of  his 
college  life.  As  I  have  said  elsewhere, 
"  Many  parents  regard  college  as  far  less 
serious  in  its  demands  than  school  or 
business,  as  a  place  of  delightful  irrespon- 
sibility, a  sort  of  four  years'  breathing- 
space  wherein  a  youth  may  at  once  cul- 


22      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

tivate  and  disport  himself  before  he  is 
condemned  for  life  to  hard  labor."  They 
"  like  to  see  young  people  have  a  good 
time ; "  a  little  evasion,  a  little  law-break- 
ing, and  a  handful  of  wild  oats  mark  in 
their  minds  the  youth  of  spirit.  They 
distinguish  between  outwitting  the  au- 
thorities, whom  they  still  regard  as  im- 
personal or  hostile,  and  outwitting  other 
less  disinterested  friends.  "  Boys  will  be 
boys "  is  a  cover,  not  merely  for  the 
thoughtless  exuberance  of  lively  young 
animals,  but  for  selfishness,  trickiness, 
cruelty,  and  even  vice.  I  wonder  at  the 
rashness  with  which  respectable  men  talk 
of  wild  oats  as  a  normal  and  on  the  whole 
an  attractive  attribute  of  youth  ;  for  the 
wild  oats  theory  of  a  young  man's  life, 
when  seen  without  its  glamour,  may 
mean  awful  physical  peril,  disingenuous 
relations  with  father  and  mother,  dis- 
honor to  some  girl,  as  yet  perhaps  un- 
known, who  is  going  to  be  his  wife. 
Yet  parents,  whether  by  precept  or  by 


AND   CHARACTER          23 

example  or  by  mere  personal  ineffective- 
ness or  by  dulness  and  neglect,  encour- 
age that  very  disingenuousness  which  is 
exercised  against  themselves.  Those 
who  have  seen  the  unhappiness  that 
such  disingenuousness  brings  can  never 
forget  it.  I  have  been  begged  by  un- 
dergraduates to  keep  students  out  of 
a  great  Boston  gambling-house,  long 
since  closed.  In  that  gambling-house 
as  Freshmen  they  had  become  bank- 
rupt ;  and  for  months  —  almost  for  years 
—  they  had  shifted  and  lied  to  keep 
their  bankruptcy  unknown  at  home. 
The  crash  of  discovery  had  come,  as  it 
always  comes  ;  the  air  had  cleared ;  and 
as  Seniors  they  were  unwilling  to  leave 
college  without  at  least  an  attempt  to 
save  other  Freshmen  from  doing  and 
from  suffering  what  they  had  done  and 
suffered.  I  have  seen  sons  before  the 
crash,  and  I  have  seen  parents  after  it. 

How  much  that  is  objectionable   in 
college  life  is  the  result  of  injudicious 


24      SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

money  allowances  (whether  princely  or 
niggardly),  I  have  never  determined. 
Some  students  use  large  incomes  as  wisely 
as  their  elders  and  more  generously; 
some  pay  the  entire  college  expenses  of 
fellow  students  in  need :  others,  no  doubt, 
have  more  money  than  is  good  for  them ; 
but  it  is  hard  to  pick  out  that  part  of 
their  moral  and  academic  disaster  for 
which  wealth  is  responsible. 

I  may  mention  here  that  two-edged 
argument  so  often  urged  by  a  father 
when  his  son  is  to  be  dismissed  from 
college :  "  If  you  don't  keep  him  here, 
what  shall  I  do  with  him?  He  is  n't  fit 
for  anything  else ;  he  would  do  nothing 
in  a  profession  or  in  business."  I  cannot 
say  with  some  that  it  is  no  concern  of 
the  college  what  is  done  with  him ;  for  a 
college,  as  I  conceive  it,  has  some  inter- 
est in  the  future  of  every  boy  that  has 
darkened  its  doors  :  but  I  can  say  that  a 
youth  confessedly  fit  for  nothing  else  is 
not  often  good  timber  for  an  alumnus. 


AND   CHARACTER         25 

A  college  is  not  a  home  for  incurables 
or  a  limbo  for  the  dull  and  inefficient. 
Moreover,  as  a  Western  father  observed, 
"  It  does  not  pay  to  spend  two  thousand 
dollars  on  a  two-dollar  boy."  Though 
a  firm  believer  in  college  training  as  the 
supreme  intellectual  privilege  of  youth, 
I  am  convinced  that  the  salvation  of 
some  young  men  (for  the  practical  pur- 
poses of  this  present  world)  is  in  taking 
them  out  of  college  and  giving  them 
long  and  inevitable  hours  in  some  office 
or  factory.  I  do  not  mean  that  all  success 
in  college  belongs  to  the  good  scholars ; 
for  many  a  youth  who  stands  low  in  his 
classes  gets  incalculable  benefit  from  his 
college  course.  He  may  miss  that  im- 
portant part  of  training  which  consists 
in  his  doing  the  thing  for  which  he  is 
booked ;  but  he  does  something  for  which 
-  through  a  natural  mistake,  if  it  is  a 
mistake  —  he  thinks  he  is  booked  :  he 
leads  an  active  life,  of  subordination 
here,  of  leadership  there,  of  responsibility 


26      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

everywhere ;  and  he  leads  it  in  a  com- 
munity where  learning  and  culture 
abound,  where  ideals  are  noble,  and 
where  courage  and  truth  are  rated  high. 
Such  a  young  man,  if  he  barely  scrapes 
through  (provided  he  scrapes  through 
honestly),  has  wasted  neither  his  father's 
money  nor  his  own  time.  Even  the  de- 
sultory reader  who  contracts,  at  the  ex- 
pense of  his  studies,  what  has  been  called 
"the  library  habit,"  may  become  the 
glory  of  his  Alma  Mater.  It  is  the  weak- 
kneed  dawdler  who  ought  to  go,  the 
youth  whose  body  and  mind  are  wasting 
away  in  bad  hours  and  bad  company, 
and  whose  sense  of  truth  grows  dimmer 
and  dimmer  in  the  smoke  of  his  cigar- 
ettes ;  yet  it  is  precisely  this  youth  who, 
through  mere  inertia,  is  hardest  to  move, 
who  seems  glued  to  the  university,  whose 
father  is  helpless  before  his  future,  and 
whose  relatives  contend  that,  since  he  is 
no  man's  enemy  but  his  own,  he  should 
be  allowed  to  stay  in  college  so  long  as 


AND    CHARACTER         27 

his  father  will  pay  his  tuition  fee,  —  as 
if  a  college  were  a  public  conveyance 
wherein  anybody  that  pays  his  fare  may 
abide  "  unless  personally  obnoxious,"  or 
a  hotel  where  anybody  that  pays  enough 
may  lie  in  bed  and  have  all  the  good 
things  sent  up  to  him.  No  college  — 
certainly  no  college  with  an  elective  sys- 
tem, which  presupposes  a  youth's  inter- 
est in  his  own  intellectual  welfare  —  can 
afford  to  keep  such  as  he.  Nor  can  he 
afford  to  be  kept.  One  of  the  first  aims 
of  college  life  is  increase  of  power :  be 
he  scholar  or  athlete,  the  sound  under- 
graduate learns  to  meet  difficulties; 
"stumbling-blocks,"  in  the  words  of  an 
admirable  preacher,  "  become  stepping- 
stones."  It  is  a  short-sighted  kindness 
that  keeps  in  college  (with  its  priceless 
opportunities  for  growth  and  its  corre- 
sponding opportunities  for  degeneration) 
a  youth  who  lies  down  in  front  of  his 
stumbling-blocks  in  the  vague  hope  that 
by  and  by  the  authorities  will  have  them 
carted  away. 


28     SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

The  only  substitute  for  the  power  that 
surmounts  obstacles  is  the  enthusiasm 
before  which  obstacles  disappear ;  and 
sometimes  a  student  who  has  never  got 
hold  of  his  work  finds  on  a  sudden  that 
it  has  got  hold  of  him.  Here,  I  admit, 
is  the  loafer's  argument  (or,  rather,  the 
loafer's  father's  argument)  for  the  loafer's 
continuance  at  a  seat  of  learning.  In  any 
loafer  may  lurk  the  latent  enthusiast: 
no  man's  offering  is  so  hopelessly  non- 
combustible  that  it  never  can  be  touched 
by  the  fire  from  heaven ;  and  few  places 
are  more  exposed  to  the  sparks  than  our 
best  colleges.  Some  new  study  (chosen, 
it  may  be,  as  a  "  snap  "),  some  magnetic 
teacher,  some  classmate's  sister,  may,  in 
the  twinkling  of  an  eye,  create  and  es- 
tablish an  object  in  a  hitherto  aimless 
life,  and  an  enthusiasm  which  makes  light 
of  work, — just  as  the  call  to  arms  has 
transmuted  many  an  idler  into  a  man. 
Some  idlers  whose  regeneration  is  less 
sudden  are  idlers  at  college  chiefly  be- 


AND   CHARACTER          29 

cause  they  have  yet  to  adjust  themselves 
to  an  elective  system,  have  yet  to  find 
their  niche  in  the  intellectual  life.  Talk- 
ing with  a  famous  professor  some  years 
ago  about  his  wish  to  lower  the  re- 
quirements for  admission  to  college,  I 
expressed  the  fear  that,  with  lowered 
requirements,  would  come  a  throng  of 
idlers.  "That,"  said  he,  with  a  para- 
doxical wisdom  for  which  I  am  not  yet 
ripe,  but  which  I  have  at  last  begun  to 
understand,  "  That  is  precisely  what  I 
should  like  to  see.  I  should  like  to  see 
an  increase  in  the  number  of  these  idle 
persons ;  for  here  are  set  before  them 
higher  ideals  than  are  set  before  them 
elsewhere."  "  People  talk  of  evil  in  col- 
lege," says  a  graduate  with  business  ex- 
perience in  New  York.  "  I  tell  you, 
college  is  a  place  of  white  purity  when 
compared  with  the  New  York  business 
world."  In  the  withdrawal  of  the  veriest 
idler  from  the  hope  of  the  vision  lies  a 
chance  of  injury;  and  this  chance,  small 


30      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

as  it  is,  may  fill  the  horizon  of  father  or 
mother.  "  Dismissal  from  college  means 
certain  ruin."  Hence  these  tears  of  strong 
men,  these  "  fits  of  the  asterisks  "  in  un- 
disciplined women.  Hence  those  varia- 
tions in  the  father  who  first  proclaims 
that  his  son  must  stand  near  the  head  of 
his  class  or  go;  next,  when  that  son  has 
fallen  short  of  the  least  that  the  college 
demands,  drags  out  every  argument  good 
or  bad  for  keeping  him  till  the  end, — 
and  at  last  almost  leaps  for  joy  if  he  is 
warranted  auction-sound  on  Commence- 
ment Day.  Recognition  of  the  possible 
disaster  in  withdrawal  may  be  blended, 
in  a  parent's  mind,  with  desire  to  avoid 
personal  mortification  ;  but  it  is  a  strong 
motive  for  all  that,  and  a  worthy  one. 
It  makes  an  administrative  officer  cau- 
tious in  action,  and  enables  him  to  listen 
with  sympathy  to  pleading  for  which  a 
careless  outsider  might  find  no  excuse. 

Yet  the  chance  is  too  small,  and  the 
risk  is  too  great.  The  shock  of  adversity 
when  the  doors  of  the  college  close,  the 


AND   CHARACTER         31 

immediate  need  of  hard,  low-paid  work 
in  a  cold  world  where  there  is  no  success 
without  industry,  may  be  the  one  saving 
thing  after  the  failure  of  the  academic 
invitation  to  duty  with  no  palpable  rela- 
tion of  industry  to  success.  Compulsory 
labor  with  a  definite  object  may  at  length 
bring  voluntary  labor  and  that  enjoyment 
of  work  without  which  nobody  who  is 
so  fortunate  as  to  work  for  his  living 
through  most  of  his  waking  hours  can  be 
efficient  or  happy ;  and  exclusion  from 
college  is  sometimes  the  awakening  from 
dull  and  selfish  immaturity  into  respon- 
sible manhood.  No  one  is  entitled  to  a 
college  education  who  does  not  earn  the 
right  from  day  to  day  by  strenuous  or 
by  enthusiastic  life ;  college  is  for  the 
ablest  and  the  best :  yet,  as  some  fathers 
send  their  least  efficient  sons  into  the 
ministry,  as  some  men  who  have  failed 
in  divers  walks  of  life  seek  a  refuge  as 
teachers  of  literature,  so,  and  with  results 
almost  as  deplorable,  some  people  send 
their  boys  to  college  because  nobody 


32      SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

can  see  in  those  boys  a  single  sign  of 
usefulness. 

Wise  fathers  and  mothers,  when  they 
visit  a  college  officer,  are  commonly  con- 
cerned with  their  sons'  courses  of  study ; 
their  mission  is  rarely  sorrowful.  The 
parents  of  troublesome  students  are  not, 
as  a  rule,  wise.  Yet  some  fathers  and 
mothers  whose  sons  have  gone  wrong 
stand  out  clearly  in  my  mind  as  almost 
everything  that  a  parent  should  be,  — 
asking  no  favors,  seeing  clearly  and 
promptly  the  distinction  between  the 
honorable  and  the  dishonorable,  and  the 
distinction  between  the  honorable  and 
the  half  honorable,  holding  the  standard 
high  for  their  sons  and  for  themselves  in 
every  relation  of  life :  women  struggling 
in  silent  loyalty  to  free  their  children  from 
the  iniquity  of  the  fathers,  and  men  as 
tender  as  women  and  as  true  as  truth 
itself.  What  they  are  to  their  sons  we 
can  only  guess ;  to  an  administrative 
officer,  they  are  "as  the  shadow  of  a 
great  rock  in  a  weary  land." 


AND   CHARACTER          33 


II 


SOME  OLD-FASHIONED  DOUBTS  ABOUT 
NEW-FASHIONED    EDUCATION 

DOUBTS  "  is  my  title,  not  "Views;" 
and,  as  this  title  indicates,  my 
paper  is  the  expression  of  a  mood  rather 
than  of  a  conviction.  An  observer  of 
educational  methods  is  often  bothered 
by  doubts  as  to  the  relative  value  of  the 
old  educational  product  and  of  the  new. 
The  new  product,  the  educated  man  of 
to-day,  is  in  some  measure  the  necessity 
of  the  time.  The  demands  of  a  special 
calling  require  preparation  so  early  and 
so  long  that  the  all-round  man  —  that 
invaluable  species  which  has  leavened 
and  civilized  all  society  —  bids  fair  to 
be  soon  as  extinct  as  the  dodo.  No  one 
denies  that  the  rare  being  who,  in  spite 
of  the  elective  principle,  persists  in  get- 


34      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

ting  a  general  education  first  and  a  spe- 
cial one  later,  is  a  man  of  more  power 
than  if  he  had  been  driven  through  a 
general  education  by  some  other  will 
than  his  own  ;  yet  with  the  kindergarten 
at  one  end  of  our  education  and  with 
the  elective  system  at  the  other,  we  see, 
or  seem  to  see,  a  falling  off  in  the  vigor 
with  which  men  attack  distasteful  but 
useful  things,  —  a  shrinking  from  the 
old,  resolute  education. 

The  new  education  has  made  three 
discoveries :  — 

1 .  Education  should  always  recognize 
the  fitness  of  different  minds  for  different 
work. 

2.  The  process  of  education  need  not 
be,  and  should  not  be,  forbidding. 

3.  In   earlier   systems   of  education, 
natural  science  had  not  a  fair  place. 

No  wonder  that  the  new  education 
seems  to  some  men  a  proclamation  of 
freedom.  The  elective  system,  with  its 
branches  and  connections,  is  the  natural 


AND   CHARACTER         35 

reaction  from  the  unintelligently  rigid 
ignoring  of  mental  difference  in  indi- 
viduals. Its  fundamental  idea  is  practi- 
cal, and  at  times  inspiring.  When  there 
are  so  many  more  things  worth  knowing 
than  anybody  can  master,  to  force  every- 
body through  a  limited  number  of  de- 
finite tasks  before  calling  him  educated, 
to  make  him  give  years  to  studies  in 
which  he  may  be  a  dunce,  without  a 
glimpse  (except  stolen  glimpses)  of  other 
studies  for  which  he  may  have  peculiar 
aptitude,  seems  flying  in  the  face  of  Pro- 
vidence. A  classmate  of  mine  earned 
(so  he  says)  three  hundred  dollars  in 
teaching  a  boy,  who  is  now  a  distin- 
guished physician,  to  spell  "  biscuit ;  " 
and  another  classmate  taught  a  boy 
Greek  for  three  months,  at  the  end  of 
which  time  the  boy's  knowledge  of  that 
language  was  summed  up  in  the  words 
"  iota  scrubscript."  In  the  first  of  these 
cases,  not  much  may  be  said  for  forcing 
spelling  on  the  pupil;  in  the  second, 


36      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

not  much  for  forcing  Greek.  Again, 
people  are  more  interesting  for  being 
different,  —  for  not  being  put  through 
the  same  mill.  Uneducated  country 
people,  for  example,  are  far  more  inter- 
esting, far  more  individual,  than  mea- 
grely educated  city  people  (such  as  most 
of  the  salesmen  in  a  large  shop),  or  than 
semi-educated  school-teachers  who  are 
graduates  of  some  one  inferior  normal 
school.  We  do  not  want  men  to  be 
alike.  We  cannot  make  them  alike ; 
why  do  we  try?  If  we  wish  to  raise 
cranberries  and  beans,  and  own  a  peat 
swamp  and  a  sand  hill,  we  give  up  the 
swamp  to  the  berries  and  the  hill  to 
the  beans,  and  make  no  effort  to  raise 
both  things  in  both  kinds  of  soil.  Why 
not  let  each  man  do  what  nature  says  he 
was  made  for  *?  Why  beat  his  head  on 
a  stone  wall,  —  a  process  that  cannot 
be  good  for  his  mind  ?  The  old  plan 
of  learning  the  whole  Latin  grammar  by 
heart  was  to  some  minds  torture.  Why 


AND   CHARACTER         37 

should  the  early  exercise  of  our  powers 
and  the  training  of  those  powers  to  higher 
service  be  repellent  or  even  austere  ? 
Life  is  hard  enough  without  our  wan- 
tonly making  it  harder;  let  us  suffer 
our  boys  and  girls  to  enjoy  education. 
Again,  here  is  the  earth  we  live  on; 
here  are  the  birds  and  the  flowers :  why 
shut  out  the  study  of  these  for  Greek, 
Latin,  and  mathematics  ?  Are  the  hu- 
manities human  ?  Is  mathematics  either 
so  agreeable  or  so  useful  as  botany  or 
zoology  ? 

Every  one  of  these  questions  is  eman- 
cipatory ;  but  the  emancipation  may  be 
carried  too  far.  Look,  for  example,  at 
the  elective  system.  No  persons  lay 
themselves  open  more  recklessly  to  re- 
ductio  ad  absurdum  than  advocates  of 
the  elective  system.  Everybody  believes 
in  the  elective  system  at  some  stage 
of  education ;  the  question  is  where  to 
begin :  yet  extension  after  extension  is 
advocated  on  general  grounds  of  liberty 


147238 


38      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

(such  liberty,  by  the  way,  as  nobody  has 
in  active  life) ;  and  propositions  are 
brought  forward  which,  if  we  accept 
them,  give  the  elective  system  no  logi- 
cal end.  Down  it  goes,  through  college, 
high  school,  and  grammar  school,  till 
not  even  the  alphabet  can  stop  it. 

Doubt  I.  Are  we  sure  that  we  do  not 
begin  the  elective  system  too  early,  or 
that  we  shall  not  soon  begin  it  too  early  ? 

The  attempt  to  make  education  less 
forbidding  has  called  forth  various  de- 
vices, among  them  the  method  of  teach- 
ing children  to  read  without  teaching 
them  to  spell ;  and  the  kindergarten  is 
responsible  for  various  attempts  to  make 
children  believe  they  are  playing  games 
when  they  are,  or  should  be,  studying. 
Here,  for  example,  is  an  extract  from  a 
book  designed  to  teach  children  har- 
mony, but  entitled  The  Story  of  Major 
C.  and  his  Relatives  :  — 

"  We  will  stop  a  moment  and  play 


AND   CHARACTER          39 

a  game  or  two  of  scale  with  these  flat 
Majors,  and  then  go  on  to  the  other  fam- 
ilies waiting  for  us.  Major  F  and  his 
children  play  in  just  the  same  way  as 
his  next-door  neighbor,  Major  G,  and 
he  also  has  one  sign  or  mark ;  but  instead 
of  its  being  a  sharp,  it  is  a  flat,  and  he 
too  has  one  dark-haired  child,  which  he 
calls  B  Flat.  You  see  how  easy  it  really 
is  to  play  a  scale,  if  you  only  remem- 
ber this  rule  about  No.  Four  and  No. 
Eight,  which  is  always  the  same  in  all 
the  Major  families. 

"  All  the  other  Majors  excepting 
Major  C  Flat  live  on  the  second  floor, 
and  all  call  themselves  flats ;  so  you  may 
begin  anywhere  on  any  of  these  black 
keys  and  play  a  scale.  Before  you  leave 
these  Majors,  you  must  notice  that  Ma- 
jor C  Flat  and  Major  B  have  to  enter  by 
the  same  door,  but  when  they  are  once 
inside,  each  has  a  home  and  a  family  of 
his  own. 

"  There  is  a  reason  for  this,  and  some 


40      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

day,  when  you  are  a  little  older,  I  hope 
that  I  may  explain  it  to  you. 

"  If  you  will  go  to  the  piano,  and 
play  a  game  of  scale  with  Major  F  and 
his  children,  you  will  probably  find  them 
jumping  and  frisking  about  like  little 
kittens,  but  at  a  word  from  the  Major 
they  take  their  places  in  the  same  way 
as  the  other  children,  —  all  Major  sec- 
onds apart,  except  this  cuddling  little 
No.  Four  and  No.  Eight,  who  are  al- 
ways minors,  whether  in  a  Sharp  or  a 
Flat  family." 

A  modern  text-book  on  the  study  of 
language  remarks  that  in  walking  out 
we  see  various  kinds  of  birds,  —  spar- 
rows, robins,  hens,  and  what  not ;  and 
that  just  as  there  are  various  kinds  of 
birds,  so  there  are  various  kinds  of 
words,  —  nouns,  verbs,  adjectives.  I  see 
signs  of  a  reaction  from  these  debili- 
tated methods,  —  in  particular  from  the 
method  which  teaches  children  reading 
without  spelling ;  but  the  effect  of  these 
methods  is  with  us  still. 


AND   CHARACTER          41 

Doubt  II.  Are  we  sure  that  the  en- 
joyment which  we  wish  to  put  into  edu- 
cation is  sufficiently  robust  *? 

I  may  teach  a  boy  to  saw  wood  by 
suggesting  that  we  play  "  Education  in 
Cuba."  We  may  imagine  ourselves  a 
committee  for  supplying  the  island  with 
as  many  teachers  as  possible,  both  men 
and  women.  Oak  sticks  will  furnish 
men,  and  pine  sticks  women  (the  softer 
sex) ;  every  sawing  will  make  one  more 
teacher,  and  every  sawing  through  a 
knot  a  superintendent.  This  clever 
scheme  has  at  least  the  merit  of  an  un- 
disguised attempt  to  make  a  hard  job  less 
disagreeable,  and  does  not  interfere  with 
the  clear  understanding  on  the  boy's 
part  that  he  is  sawing  wood  to  help  the 
family ;  just  as  Meg,  Jo,  Beth,  and  Amy, 
when  they  called  the  four  hems  Europe, 
Asia,  Africa,  and  America,  and  talked 
about  each  continent  as  they  went  along, 
knew  perfectly  well  that  they  were  work- 


42      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

ing.  No  imaginative  device,  however 
feeble,  will  take  away  the  manliness  of  a 
boy  who  knows  that  work  is  work,  and 
makes  play  of  it  when  he  honestly  can ; 
but  nothing  debilitates  a  boy  more  effec- 
tively than  the  notion  that  teachers  exist 
for  his  amusement,  and  that  if  education 
does  not  allure  him  so  much  the  worse 
for  education. 

As  to  natural  science,  I  admit  that  it 
had  not  in  the  old-fashioned  programmes 
a  dignified  place, — such  a  place  as  would 
be  given  to  it  by  the  Committee  of  Ten ; 
yet  natural  science  may  not  even  now 
have  proved  its  equality  with  classics 
and  mathematics  as  a  disciplinary  sub- 
ject for  boys  and  girls.  The  Committee 
of  Ten  maintained  the  proposition  that 
all  studies  are  born  free  and  equal,  — 
possibly  with  an  inkling  that  the  new 
studies  are,  so  to  speak,  freer  and  more 
equal  than  the  old.  Any  one  who  clings 
to  the  old  studies  as  a  better  foundation 
for  training  is  told  that  his  doctrine  con- 


AND  CHARACTER         43 

tradicts  the  principles  of  the  Committee 
of  Ten:  but  even  this  does  not  satisfy 
him,  since  he  may  not  be  sure  of  the 
basis  for  the  committee's  conclusions. 
If  the  earth  rests  on  an  elephant,  and  the 
elephant  rests  on  a  tortoise,  the  tortoise 
is  a  good  tortoise,  but  still  we  need  to 
know  what  the  tortoise  rests  on. 

Again,  we  are  told  —  and  if  I  am  not 
mistaken,  we  are  told  by  enthusiastic 
advocates  of  new  methods  —  that  the 
object  of  education  is  not  knowledge  so 
much  as  power ;  in  Greek,  for  example, 
we  no  longer  ask  a  boy  to  know  three 
books  of  the  Iliad,  "  omitting  the  Cata- 
logue of  the  Ships,"  —  we  ask  him  to 
translate  Homer  at  sight:  yet  modern 
doctrine  fails  to  see,  except  in  glimpses, 
that  no  better  way  of  gaining  power  has 
yet  been  discovered  than  the  overcoming 
of  difficulties.  The  fear  old-fashioned 
people  have  about  new-fashioned  educa- 
tion is  that  too  much  depends  on  whim, 
and  that  whim  may  be  born  of  indolence. 


44      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

*  Take  the  old  system  in  its  most  mon- 
strous form,  —  take  learning  the  Latin 
grammar  by  heart  before  translating  any 
Latin  author;  nobody  now  defends  a 
practice  so  stupid:  yet  that  wonderful 
feat  of  memory  strengthened  many  a 
memory  for  other  wonderful  feats.  The 
boy  who  had  mastered  Andrews  and 
Stoddard  knew  the  power  of  patient 
effort,  the  strength  of  drudgery  well  done. 
Through  a  natural  reaction,  memory  is 
underrated  now.  Education  at  the  time 
when  memory  is  trained  easiest  and  best 
must  be  saved  from  the  barrenness  of 
memory  work  and  must  be  "  enriched." 
Even  the  multiplication  table  is  threat- 
ened with  banishment.  We  leave  the 
strait  and  narrow  way,  and  wobble  all 
over  the  flowery  meadows.  We  are 
held  down  to  accuracy  so  little  that  it  is 
next  to  impossible  to  find  a  youth  who 
can  copy  a  list  of  printed  names  without 
misspelling.  We  have  boys  who  can- 
not spell,  men  who  cannot  spell,  teachers 


AND   CHARACTER          45 

who  cannot  spell,  teachers  of  English  who 
cannot  spell,  college  professors  who  can- 
not spell  and  who  have  a  mean  opinion 
of  spelling. 

If  there  is  one  set  of  phrases  more 
threadbare  than  another,  it  is  "  along  the 
lines,"  "  broader  lines,"  "  developing 
along  these  lines,"  and  the  like ;  and  in 
education  I  seem  to  hear,  with  weari- 
some iteration,  that  children  should  be 
taught  "  along  the  line§  of  least  resist- 
ance." The  theory  is  taking  at  first 
sight,  and  looks  eminently  practical.  In 
dealing  with  lifeless  things,  such  as  ma- 
chinery, it  is  the  only  sensible  theory,  — 
more  work  done  by  the  machine,  more 
obstacles  overcome  by  the  contriver ; 
but  it  is  an  extraordinarily  inadequate 
theory  for  the  education  of  man.  We 
see  parents  (possibly  we  are  parents) 
who  bring  up  children  "  along  the  lines 
of  least  resistance ; "  and  we  know  what 
the  children  are.  Is  it  illogical  to  infer 
that  children  taught  at  school  "along 


46      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

the  lines  of  least  resistance  "  are  intellec- 
tually spoiled  children,  flabby  of  mind 
and  will?  For  any  responsible  work 
we  want  men  of  character,  —  not  men 
who  from  childhood  up  have  been  per- 
sonally conducted  and  have  had  their 
education  warped  to  the  indolence  of 
their  minds.  It  is  necessary  to  treat  peo- 
ple as  individuals;  but  it  does  them  a 
world  of  good  sometimes  to  treat  a  great 
many  of  them  together,  and  to  let  them 
get  used  to  it  as  best  they  may.  The 
first  lesson  of  life,  as  Lowell  reminds  us, 
is  to  burn  our  own  smoke ;  that  is,  not 
to  inflict  on  outsiders  our  personal  sor- 
rows and  petty  morbidnesses,  not  to  keep 
thinking  of  ourselves  as  "exceptional 
cases."  The  sons  of  our  wealthiest  citi- 
zens may  be  educated  in  either  of  two 
ways :  they  may  be  sent  to  school,  or 
they  may  be  turned  over  to  governesses 
and  private  tutors.  Any  one  who  has 
observed  them  in  college  knows  how 
much  better  educated  those  are  who 
have  gone  to  school,  —  how  the  very 


AND   CHARACTER         47 

wealth  which  enables  a  parent  to  treat 
his  son  as  in  all  ways  exceptional  and  to 
give  him  the  most  costly  and  carefully 
adjusted  education  which  he  can  devise, 
defeats  its  own  end.  With  due  allow- 
ance for  the  occasional  boy  who  is  so 
backward  and  so  eccentric  that  he  can 
do  nothing  in  a  class,  I  believe  that  nine 
out  of  ten  of  these  pampered  youths 
would  do  better  at  a  good  school  than 
under  a  private  tutor.  The  reason  why 
they  would  do  better,  the  reason  why 
their  playmates  who  have  gone  to  school 
do  better,  lies  largely  in  the  ignoring  of 
individual  peculiarities,  —  in  the  very 
thing  to  prevent  which  they  are  kept 
out  of  school.  If  it  is  true  that  God 
made  no  two  men  alike,  it  is  equally 
true  that  He  sends  his  rain  on  the  just 
and  on  the  unjust,  and  rules  His  uni- 
verse with  inexorable  laws.  The  world 
cannot  be  our  intimate  friend,  patient 
with  our  eccentricities,  smoothing  our 
paths.  We  must  learn  this  just  as  we 
learn  not  to  pick  up  a  live  wire  and  not 


48      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

to  fool  with  the  buzz-saw.  The  world 
is  full  of  buzz-saws;  and  whether  we 
like  them  or  not,  they  keep  right  on. 
Here  I  may  cite  Mr.  W.  S.  Gilbert :  — 

TO   THE   TERRESTRIAL   GLOBE 

BY    A    MISERABLE    WRETCH 

Roll  on,  thou  ball,  roll  on  ! 

Through  -pathless  realms  of  Space 

Roll  on  ! 

What,  though  I  'm  in  a  sorry  case  ? 
What,  though  I  cannot  meet  my  bills  ? 
What,  though  I  suffer  toothache's  ills  ? 
What,  though  I  swallow  countless  pills  ? 
Never  you  mind  ! 
Roll  on  ! 

Roll  on,  thou  ball,  roll  on  ! 
Through  seas  of  inky  air 

Roll  on  ! 

It 's  true  I  've  got  no  shirts  to  wear  ; 
It 's  true  my  butcher's  bill  is  due  ; 
It 's  true  my  prospects  all  look  blue  — 
But  don't  let  that  unsettle  you  ! 
Never  you  mind  ! 
Roll  on! 

[It  rolls  on. 


AND   CHARACTER          49 

In  practical  life  the  job  has  to  be  done, 
and  the  man  must  adapt  himself  to  it  or 
lose  it ;  and  in  practical  life  everybody 
but  the  trained  man,  the  man  who  has 
gained  power  through  training,  is  going 
to  have  a  hard  time.  Education  should 
first  and  foremost  train ;  and  training 
has  for  its  very  substance  the  overcoming 
of  obstacles :  furthermore,  every  specialty 
is  better  mastered,  better  understood  in 
its  relation  to  human  life  and  achieve- 
ment, by  the  man  who  has  worked  hard 
in  other  subjects.  I  believe  that  the 
epyoi/,  or  job,  is  the  better  for  the  irdp- 
epyov,  or  side-job.  Even  now,  one  dif- 
ference between  a  college  and  a  polytech- 
nic school  is  that  the  college  provides  a 
basis  of  general  culture  for  the  specialist 
to  build  on,  whereas  the  polytechnic 
school  aims  rather  to  put  a  man  into  a 
self-supporting  specialty  with  no  "  frills." 
There  is  something  the  same  difference 
between  a  man  of  science  and  a  mechanic. 

"  In  his  own  early  youth,"  says  Dr. 


50      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

Martineau,  as  cited  by  the  Boston  Her- 
ald, "  education  was  thought  of  use  more 
to  correct  the  weak  side  of  one's  nature 
than  to  develop  its  strong  side,  and  so 
he  gave  double  time  to  the  studies  he 
disliked.  This  he  admits  to  have  been 
too  ascetic  a  rule,  and  yet  preferable,  on 
the  whole,  to  the  emasculate  extreme  of 
doing  nothing  but  what  one  likes  to  do, 
so  prevalent  to-day.  Power  to  drudge 
at  distasteful  tasks  he  considers  the  test 
of  faculty,  the  price  of  knowledge,  and 
the  matter  of  duty,  and  that  without  this 
the  stuff  is  in  no  man  that  will  make  him 
either  the  true  scholar  or  the  true  Chris- 
tian. At  present  the  tendency  is  largely 
the  other  way.  To  choose  none  but 
studies  agreeable  and  attractive  from  the 
start  is  what  young  people  are  more  and 
more  disposed  to  insist  on.  Virtually, 
the  student  comes  to  the  professor  with 
a  bill  of  rights  in  his  hands,  and  says, 
4  Mind,  you  must  not  be  dull,  or  I  will 
go  to  sleep ;  you  must  attract  me,  or  I 


AND   CHARACTER          51 

shall  not  get  on  an  inch ;  you  must  rivet 
my  attention,  or  my  thoughts  will  wan- 
der.' Very  well,  then,  if  such  be  your 
mood,  go  to  sleep,  do  not  get  on  an  inch, 
and  let  your  attention  wander,  is  Dr. 
Martineau's  justly  contemptuous  feeling 
at  such  sort  of  inanity.  '  I  warn  you,'  he 
says,  4  that  this  enervated  mood  is  the 
canker  of  manly  thought  and  action.' 
Now  there  is  something  tonic  and  bra- 
cing in  this  attitude  of  rebuff  to  the  half- 
weakly,  half-insolent  tone  of  so  many  of 
the  young  people  of  to-day.  If  you  want 
us  to  be  virtuous,  heroic,  learned,  and 
accomplished,  they  practically  say  to  the 
church,  the  school,  the  college,  to  their 
parents,  you  will  have  to  exert  yourselves. 
We  want  to  gratify  you,  but  will  toler- 
ate nothing  dry,  nothing  hard,  nothing 
ascetic.  The  duty  of  the  preacher  or  of 
the  professor  is  to  waft  us  to  Heaven  or 
Parnassus  on  gentle  zephyrs ;  otherwise 
each  must  endure  the  pain  of  seeing  us 
conclude  to  go  somewhere  else." 


52      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

So  far  what  I  have  said  is  chiefly  the- 
ory ;  but  the  a  priori  reasoning  is  sup- 
ported by  painful  signs,  —  by  crude  spe- 
cialists that  one  shudders  to  think  of  as 
educated  men  (learned  men  doubtless, 
but  not  educated  men) ;  by  hundreds  of 
students  who  lack  the  very  underpinning 
of  education,  who  are  so  far  from  know- 
ing the  first  lesson  of  training  —  namely, 
that  to  be  happy  and  successful  they 
must  get  interested  in  what  they  have 
to  do,  and  that  doing  it  regularly  and 
earnestly  means  getting  interested  —  so 
far  from  knowing  this,  that  they  sit  in 
front  of  a  book  helpless  to  effect  any 
useful  transfer  of  the  author's  mind  to 
theirs.  Brought  up  to  feel  that  the  teacher 
must  interest  them,  they  have  become 
so  reduced  that  they  would  like,  as  it 
were,  to  lie  in  bed  and  have  their  studies 
sent  up  to  them.  Unwittingly  the  new- 
fashioned  education  encourages  their  in- 
dolence. I  remember  talking  some  years 
ago  with  a  student  who  was  fond  of 


AND   CHARACTER         53 

chemistry,  but  whose  habits  of  work,  as 
I  saw  them  in  another  subject,  were 
shiftless  and  slack.  I  tried  to  show  him 
the  necessity,  even  for  his  chemistry,  of 
habitual  accuracy  in  thought  and  ex- 
pression ;  and  at  last  I  told  him  that, 
though  the  position  he  took  might  do 
for  a  genius,  it  would  not  do  for  ordinary 
men  like  himself  and  me.  He  replied 
that  he  had  rather  be  anything  than  an 
ordinary  man.  What  he  is  now,  I  do 
not  know.  Another  student  refused  to 
take  pains  with  his  English  because,  as 
he  said,  he  had  been  brought  up  among 
people  who  spoke  English  well  "  by  in- 
tuition." This  intuitive  English  is  often 
picturesque  and  winning ;  but  it  is  sel- 
dom capable  of  difficult  work. 

How  many  boys  know  what  will  best 
develop  their  minds  ?  How  many  par- 
ents, even  if  themselves  educated,  can 
resist  the  combined  pressure  of  boys 
and  plausible  new-fashioned  educators  ? 
Even  the  youth  who  wants  the  old  pre- 


54       SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

scribed  curriculum  cannot  get  it ;  he 
may  choose  the  old  studies,  but  not  the 
old  instruction.  Instruction  under  an 
elective  system  is  aimed  at  the  specialist. 
In  elective  mathematics,  for  example, 
the  non-mathematical  student  who  takes 
the  study  for  self-discipline  finds  the 
instruction  too  high  for  him;  indeed, 
he  finds  no  encouragement  for  electing 
mathematics  at  all.  The  new  system 
holds  that  the  study  should  follow  the 
bent  of  the  mind  rather  than  that  the 
mind  should  bend  itself  to  follow  the 
study.  As  a  result,  prescribed  work,  so 
far  as  it  exists  under  an  elective  system, 
is  regarded  by  many  students  as  folly, 
and  if  difficult,  as  persecution.  When 
the  writing  of  forensics  —  argumentative 
work  which  involved  hard  thinking  — 
was  prescribed  in  Harvard  College,  no 
work  in  the  college  was  done  less  hon- 
estly. Students  would  often  defend  them- 
selves for  cheating  in  this  study  because 
it  was  "  really  too  hard  for  a  prescribed 


AND   CHARACTER         55 

subject."  I  know  I  am  using  a  two- 
edged  argument :  does  it  show  how  the 
new  system  weakens  mental  fibre,  or 
how  the  old  system  encourages  dishon- 
esty1? Different  men  will  give  different 
answers.  As  to  forensics,  we  may  con- 
trast with  the  spirit  of  the  students  the 
spirit  of  the  man  who  did  most  for  the 
study.  A  trained  instructor,  whose  pe- 
culiar interest  lay  elsewhere,  was  asked  to 
undertake  the  difficult  and  repellent  task 
of  teaching  prescribed  argumentative 
composition.  What  resulted  is  what  al- 
ways results  when  a  trained  man  makes 
up  his  mind  to  do  a  piece  of  work  as 
well  as  he  can,  —  genuine  enthusiasm  for 
the  subject ;  and  the  instructor  who  ex- 
pected to  feel  only  a  forced  interest  in 
argumentative  composition  has  become 
an  authority  in  it. 

I  know  that  often  the  idler  bestirs 
himself,  fired  by  enthusiasm  in  his  chosen 
subject ;  and  that  then  he  sees  the  mean- 
ing, and  even  the  beauty,  of  drudgery :  but 


56      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

the  drudgery  is  less  easy,  because  he  has 
never  before  learned  to  drudge  with  en- 
thusiasm, or  even  with  the  fidelity  which 
may  in  time  beget  enthusiasm ;  because 
he  never  trained  his  memory  in  child- 
hood, when  memory  is  trained  best ;  be- 
cause he  has  always,  from  kindergarten 
to  college,  been  treated  deferentially; 
because  he  has  transferred  the  elective 
system  from  studies  to  life.  "  I  see  in 
the  new  system,"  said  a  father  the  other 
day,  "  nothing  to  establish  the  habit  of 
application  —  the  most  valuable  habit  of 
all."  "  There  is  nothing,"  said  the  teacher 
with  whom  he  was  talking,  "  unless  the 
student  gets  interested  in  some  study." 
"  Yes,"  said  the  father,  "  he  may  strike 
something  that  interests  him;  but  it 
seems  dreadfully  unscientific  to  leave  it 
all  to  chance." 

Doubt  III,  related  to  Doubt  I.  Do 
we  not  see  in  the  men  educated  accord- 
ing to  modern  methods  such  a  weakness 
in  attacking  difficulties  as  may  indicate 


AND   CHARACTER         57 

that  we  should  be  slow  to  let  the  sec- 
ondary school  march  in  the  path  of  the 
college  and  the  grammar  school  follow 
close  behind  *? 

Another  doubt  about  new-fashioned 
education  I  have  been  glad  to  see  ex- 
pressed in  recent  numbers  of  The  Nation. 
It  concerns  what  is  expected  of  teachers ; 
it  concerns  the  abnormal  value  set  on 
text-books,  and,  I  may  add,  the  abnor- 
mal value  set  by  some  institutions  on 
the  higher  degrees.  We  frequently  hear 
it  said  of  a  teacher  that  he  has  taught 
for  many  years,  but  has  "  produced  " 
nothing ;  and  this  often  means  that  he 
has  never  written  a  text-book.  I  would 
not  undervalue  text-books  as  a  practical 
result  of  experience  in  teaching  :  but  the 
teacher's  first  business  is  to  teach,  — 
writing  is  a  secondary  affair;  and,  as  a 
rule,  the  best  part  of  a  teacher's  produc- 
tion is  what  he  produces  in  the  minds 
and  in  the  characters  of  his  pupils.  Few 


58      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

of  the  great  teachers,  whether  of  schools 
or  of  colleges,  are  remembered  through 
their  text-books.  It  was  not  text-books 
that  gave  Dr.  Arnold  of  Rugby  his  hold 
on  English  boys.  The  late  Dr.  Henry 
Coit  had,  we  hear,  marvellous  insight  into 
a  boy's  character,  and  marvellous  power 
over  every  boy  who  was  near  him;  but 
we  never  hear  of  his  text-books,  —  if,  in- 
deed, he  wrote  any.  Nor  is  it  through 
text-books  that  we  know  Mr.  Amen  of 
Exeter  and  Mr.  Peabody  of  Groton. 
The  new  education  lays  so  much  stress 
on  writing  and  on  investigation,  and  on 
theses  as  the  result  of  investigation,  and 
on  originality  in  these  theses,  that  it 
seems  sometimes  to  encourage  a  young 
man  in  maintaining  a  proposition  of 
which  the  sole  value  lies  in  its  novelty 
(no  one  having  been  unwise  enough  to 
maintain  it  before),  and  in  defending  that 
proposition  by  a  Germanized  thesis,  — 

"  Monstrum  horrendum,  informe,  ingens,  cui  lumen 
ademptum." 


AND   CHARACTER          59 

Such  theses,  I  suspect,  have  more  than 
once  been  accepted  for  higher  degrees ; 
yet  higher  degrees  won  through  them 
leave  the  winner  farther  from  the  best 
qualities  of  a  teacher,  remote  from  men 
and  still  more  remote  from  boys.  It 
was  a  relief  the  other  day  to  hear  a  head- 
master say,  "  I  am  looking  for  an  under- 
teacher.  I  want  first  a  man,  and  next  a 
man  to  teach."  It  is  a  relief,  also,  to 
see  the  marked  success  of  several  school- 
masters whose  preparation  for  teaching 
consists  first  in  manliness,  and  secondly 
in  only  a  moderate  amount  of  learning. 
That  a  teacher  should  know  his  subject 
is  obvious:  nothing,  not  even  new-fash- 
ioned instruction  in  methods  of  teaching, 
will  make  up  for  ignorance  of  the  sub- 
ject itself:  but  the  man  of  intelligence 
and  self-sacrifice  who  bends  his  energy 
to  teaching  boys  will  soon  get  enough 
scholarship  for  the  purpose  ;  whereas  no 
amount  of  scholarship  can  make  up  for 
the  want  of  intelligence  and  self-sacrifice. 


60      SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

Doubt  IV.  While  fitting  the  study 
to  the  boy,  have  we  been  unfitting  the 
teacher  for  him  ? 

Obviously  the  new  education  throws 
a  tremendous  responsibility  on  teachers. 
We  see  why  it  should ;  and  all  of  us 
who  are  familiar  with  the  inner  working 
of  a  modern  school  or  a  modern  college 
know  that  it  does.  How  is  it  training 
the  new  generation  for  this  responsibil- 
ity ?  In  some  ways  admirably.  It  tries 
to  show  that  teaching  is  not  a  haphazard 
affair,  but  a  subject  for  investigation  and 
study;  it  tries  to  show  how  libraries 
should  be  used,  and  how  original  inves- 
tigation should  be  conducted :  but  old- 
fashioned  people  doubt  whether  it  gives 
due  weight  to  the  maxim  that  Professor 
Bowen  used  to  repeat  so  often,  "The 
foundation  must  be  stronger  than  the 
superstructure."  They  doubt  whether 
teachers,  themselves  educated  "  along 
the  lines  of  least  resistance,"  can  stand 


AND   CHARACTER         61 

the  strain  of  modern  teaching.  As  a 
relief  from  wooden  teaching  and  wooden 
learning,  the  new  education  deserves  all 
gratitude.  No  one  is  so  conservative  as 
to  prefer  a  dull  teacher  to  an  interesting 
one  because  the  dull  teacher  offers  more 
obstacles  to  learning.  In  this  matter,  as 
in  all  other  matters  of  education,  the 
question  is  not  whether  we  should  be 
altogether  old-fashioned  or  altogether 
new-fashioned  (we  may  be  "alike  fan- 
tastic if  too  new  or  old  "  ) :  the  question 
is  where  the  old  should  stop  and  the 
new  begin. 

Doubt  V.  In  emancipation  from  the 
evils  of  the  old  system,  may  we  not  be 
rushing  into  another  servitude  almost  or 
quite  as  dangerous  as  the  first  *? 

I  have  often  used  the  word  "  training." 
Now  what  is  training,  and  what  is  the 
peculiar  characteristic  of  the  trained 
mind  ?  Training  is  the  discipline  that 
teaches  a  man  to  set  labor  above  whim ; 


62      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

to  develop  the  less  promising  parts  of  his 
mind  as  well  as  the  more  promising;  to 
make  five  talents  ten  and  two  five ;  to 
see  that  in  his  specialty  he  shall  work 
better  and  enjoy  more  for  knowing  some- 
thing outside  of  his  specialty ;  to  recog- 
nize the  connection  between  present  toil 
and  future  attainment,  so  that  the  hope 
of  future  attainment  creates  pleasure  in 
present  toil;  to  understand  that  nothing 
can  be  mastered  without  drudgery,  and 
that  drudgery  in  preparation  for  service 
is  not  only  respectable  but  beautiful;  to 
be  interested  in  every  study,  no  matter 
how  forbidding;  to  work  steadily  and 
resolutely  until,  through  long  practice, 

—  and,  it  may  be,  after  many  failures, 

—  he  is  trusted  to  do  the  right  thing,  or 
something  near  it,  mechanically,  just  as 
the  trained  pianist  instinctively  touches 
the  right  note.     Training  is  all  this  and 
more.     Why  should  we  be  content  to 
let  so  many  of  our  boys  get  their  best 
discipline  not  from  study  but  from  ath- 
letics ? 


AND   CHARACTER         63 

"  But  the  new  education,"  you  say, 
"is  in  some  ways  more  general  than  the 
old.  From  the  start  it  opens  to  eager 
eyes  all  the  beautiful  world  of  science ; 
little  children  get  glimpses  into  subjects 
of  which  old-fashioned  little  children 
never  heard."  This  is  too  true.  Old- 
fashioned  people  have  old-fashioned 
doubts  about  what  seems  to  them  a 
showy,  all-round  substitute  for  educa- 
tion, —  a  sort  of  bluff  at  general  culture, 
such  as  we  see  when  children,  at  great 
expense  to  their  schools  (the  new  educa- 
tion is  almost  ruinously  expensive),  dis- 
sipate their  minds  by  studying  a  little 
of  everything.  I  was  delighted  to  hear 
Professor  Grandgent  say  not  long  ago, 
"  The  curse  of  modern  education  is  mul- 
tiplication of  subjects  and  painless  meth- 
ods." I  suspect  that  in  another  genera- 
tion we  may  even  overdo  the  "  enrich- 
ing" of  the  grammar  school.  I  do  not 
undervalue  the  pleasure  and  the  profit 
of  what  is  called  "a  bowing  acquaint- 
ance "  with  a  variety  of  subjects :  the 


64      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

mistake  is  to  accept  such  an  acquaint- 
ance as  education. 

The  early  specialization  as  to  which  I 
have  expressed  doubt  is  made  almost 
necessary  by  the  advance  of  learning, 
the  shortness  of  life,  and  the  leanness  of 
pocketbooks.  The  false  general  educa- 
tion is  never  necessary.  People  call  it 
broad ;  but  there  is  a  big  fallacy  in  the 
word  "  broad."  A  horizontal  line  is  no 
broader  than  a  perpendicular  one.  Just 
so  the  line  of  study  may  stretch  across 
many  subjects,  and  be  quite  as  narrow 
as  if  it  really  penetrated  one.  I  still 
doubt  whether  we  can  do  better  for  our 
children  than,  first,  to  drill  them  in  a 
few  subjects,  mostly  old  ones;  then  to 
give  them  a  modest  general  education  in 
college,  or  in  all  but  the  last  year  or  two 
of  college ;  then  to  let  them  specialize 
as  energetically  as  they  can  (but  not  ex- 
clusively), —  and  throughout  to  keep  in 
their  minds,  not  pleasure  only,  but  the 
stern  Lawgiver  who  wears  the  Godhead's 
most  benignant  grace. 


AND   CHARACTER         65 

III 

COLLEGE   HONOR 

"  I  X)  an  American  college  the  word  of 
A  all  words  is  "truth."  "Veritas" 
is  the  motto  of  Harvard ;  "  Lux  et  Veri- 
tas "  the  motto  of  Yale.  On  one  of  the 
new  Harvard  gates  is  inscribed  the  com- 
mand from  the  song  in  Isaiah,  "  Open 
ye  the  gates,  that  the  righteous  nation 
which  keepeth  the  truth  may  enter  in  ; " 
and  no  better  text  can  be  found  for  the 
sons  of  our  universities  than  "  Ye  shall 
know  the  truth,  and  the  truth  shall  make 
you  free."  To  guard  the  truth  and  to 
proclaim  the  truth  are  duties  which  the 
better  colleges  have,  on  the  whole,  hon- 
estly performed.  Now  and  then,  in  the 
fancied  opposition  of  religion  and  science, 
a  college  has  preferred  to  guard  what  it 
believes  to  be  one  kind  of  truth  rather 


66      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

than  to  proclaim  another.  "  This  is  not 
a  comfortable  place  to  teach  science  in," 
said  a  young  geologist  who  had  gone 
from  Harvard  to  a  university  in  the 
West.  "  The  President  says,  '  If  any- 
body asks  questions  about  the  antiquity 
of  the  earth,  send  him  to  me.'  "  Yet,  in 
our  older  and  stronger  colleges  at  any 
rate,  fearless  investigation  and  free  and 
fearless  speech  are  the  rule,  even  at  the 
sacrifice  of  popularity  and  of  money. 

Now,  whether  truth  be  truth  of  re- 
ligion, or  of  science,  or  of  commerce, 
or  of  intercourse  among  fellow  men,  a 
college  to  stand  for  it  must  believe  in  it. 
As  an  institution  of  learning,  a  college 
must  be  an  institution  of  truth;  as  a 
school  of  character,  it  must  be  a  school 
of  integrity.  It  can  have  no  other  justi- 
fication. Yet,  outside  of  politicians  and 
horse-traders,  no  men  are  more  commonly 
charged  with  disingenuousness  than  col- 
lege presidents ;  and  in  no  respectable 
community  are  certain  kinds  of  dishon- 


AND   CHARACTER         67 

esty  more  readily  condoned  than  among 
college  students.  The  relation  of  college 
to  college,  whether  in  a  conference  of 
professors  or  in  a  contest  of  athletes,  is 
too  often  a  relation  of  suspicion,  if  not 
of  charge  and  countercharge.  Intercol- 
legiate discussion  of  admission  require- 
ments may  have  an  atmosphere,  not 
of  common  interest  in  education,  but  of 
rivalry  in  intercollegiate  politics ;  and, 
as  everybody  knows,  a  discussion  of 
athletics  at  one  college  frequently  shows 
an  almost  complete  want  of  confidence 
in  the  honesty  of  athletics  at  another. 
Yet  every  college  would  maintain  stead- 
ily, and  nearly  every  college  would  main- 
tain honestly,  that  it  stands  for  the  truth. 
When  I  speak  of  a  college  as  believ- 
ing in  the  truth,  I  mean  first  that  its 
President  and  Faculty  must  be  honest 
and  fearless  ;  but  I  mean  more  than  this. 
I  mean  also  that  a  high  standard  of  honor 
must  be  maintained  by  its  undergradu- 
ates ;  for,  far  beyond  the  belief  of  most 


68     SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

men,  the  standing  of  a  college  in  the 
community  and  the  effect  of  a  college 
in  the  country  depend  on  the  personal 
character  of  the  undergraduates.  This 
personal  character  depends  in  a  measure 
on  the  straightforwardness  and  the  hu- 
man quality  of  the  college  teachers ;  but 
what  Cardinal  Newman  says  of  intel- 
lectual development  in  the  university  is 
equally  true  of  moral  development :  — 
"  When  a  multitude  of  young  men, 
keen,  open-hearted,  sympathetic,  and  ob- 
servant, as  young  men  are,  come  to- 
gether and  freely  mix  with  each  other, 
they  are  sure  to  learn  one  from  an- 
other, even  if  there  be  no  one  to  teach 
them ;  the  conversation  of  all  is  a  series 
of  lectures  to  each,  and  they  gain  for 
themselves  new  ideas  and  views,  fresh 
matter  of  thought,  and  distinct  principles 
for  judging  and  acting  day  by  day. 

"  I  am  but  saying  that  that  youthful 
community  will  constitute  a  whole,  it 


AND   CHARACTER          69 

will  embody  a  specific  idea,  it  will  re- 
present a  doctrine,  it  will  administer  a 
code  of  conduct,  and  it  will  furnish  prin- 
ciples of  thought  and  action.  It  will 
give  birth  to  a  living  teaching,  which  in 
the  course  of  time  will  take  the  shape  of 
a  self-perpetuating  tradition,  or  a  genius 
loci,  as  it  is  sometimes  called;  which 
haunts  the  home  where  it  has  been  born, 
and  which  imbues  and  forms,  more  or 
less,  and  one  by  one,  every  individual 
who  is  successively  brought  under  its 
shadow.  Thus  it  is  that,  independent 
of  direct  instruction  on  the  part  of  su- 
periors, there  is  a  sort  of  self-education 
in  the  academic  institutions  of  Protes- 
tant England ;  a  characteristic  tone  of 
thought,  a  recognized  standard  of  judg- 
ment, is  found  in  them,  which,  as  de- 
veloped in  the  individual  who  is  submit- 
ted to  it,  becomes  a  twofold  source  of 
strength  to  him,  both  from  the  distinct 
stamp  it  impresses  on  his  mind,  and  from 
the  bond  of  union  which  it  creates  be- 


yo      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

tween  him  and  others,  —  effects  which 
are  shared  by  the  authorities  of  the  place, 
for  they  themselves  have  been  educated 
in  it,  and  at  all  times  are  exposed  to  the 
influence  of  its  ethical  atmosphere." 

In  any  community  the  students  of  a 
college  make  a  tremendous  power  for 
good  or  evil ;  and  by  them  in  college, 
and  by  them  after  they  have  left  college, 
their  college  shall  be  judged.  I£  as 
Cardinal  Newman  puts  it,  the  practical 
end  of  a  university  course  is  "  training 
good  members  of  society  "  (and,  I  may 
add,  training  leaders  of  men),  nothing 
can  be  of  more  importance  in  a  univer- 
sity, and  scarcely  anything  can  be  of 
more  importance  in  a  community,  than 
the  attitude  of  undergraduates  in  ques- 
tions of  truth  and  falsehood. 

Those  who  constantly  inspect  this  at- 
titude find  much  to  encourage  them. 
The  undergraduate  standard  of  honor  for 
college  officers  is  so  sensitively  high  that 
no  one  need  despair  of  the  students' 


AND    CHARACTER          71 

ethical  intelligence.  No  doubt,  disin- 
genuousness  is  sometimes  believed  of  the 
wrong  man ;  the  upright  professor  with 
a  reserved  or  forbidding  manner  may 
get  a  name  for  untrustworthiness,  while 
the  honor  of  his  less  responsible  but 
more  genial  colleague  is  unquestioned : 
yet  the  blindness  here  is  the  blindness  of 
youthful  prejudice.  The  nature  of  dis- 
ingenuousness  is  seen  clearly  enough ; 
and  the  recognition  of  it  in  an  instructor 
condemns  him  for  all  time.  There  is 
indeed  but  one  way  in  which  a  man  with- 
out extraordinary  personal  charm  may 
gain  and  keep  the  confidence  of  students: 
by  scrupulous  openness  in  all  his  deal- 
ings with  them,  great  or  small.  A  mo- 
ment's forgetfulness,  a  moment's  evasive- 
ness, —  even  a  moment's  appearance  of 
evasiveness,  —  may  crack  the  thin  ice 
on  which  every  college  officer  is  skating 
as  best  he  can ;  and  the  necessity  of 
keeping  the  secrets  of  less  scrupulous 
persons  may  break  it  through.  In  some 


72      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

ways  all  this  is  healthy.  A  young  fel- 
low who  sees  a  high  standard  of  truth 
for  anybody's  conduct  may  in  time  see 
it  for  his  own.  All  he  needs  is  to  dis- 
cover that  the  world  was  not  made  for 
him  only;  and  a  year  or  two  out  of 
college  should  teach  him  that.  What 
he  lacks  is  not  principle,  but  experience 
and  readjustment.  This  is  the  lack  in 
the  average  undergraduate.  It  is  only 
a  highly  exceptional  student  who  speaks 
frankly  to  all  (college  officers  included) 
of  the  lies  he  has  told  in  tight  places, 
and  who  seems  never  to  question  an 
implied  premise  that  in  tight  places  all 
men  lie. 

Another  healthy  sign  is  the  high  stan- 
dard of  honor  in  athletic  training.  This 
standard,  indeed,  may  be  cruelly  high. 
The  slightest  breach  of  training  con- 
demns a  student  in  the  eyes  of  a  whole 
college,  and  is  almost  impossible  to  live 
down.  Still  another  healthy  sign  is  the 
character  of  the  men  whom,  in  our  best 


AND   CHARACTER          73 

colleges,  the  undergraduates  instinctively 
choose  as  class  presidents,  as  athletic  cap- 
tains, and  in  general  as  leaders.  Grown 
men,  electing  a  President  of  the  United 
States  for  four  years,  are  not  always  so 
fortunate  as  Harvard  Freshmen,  who 
after  eight  or  ten  weeks  of  college  expe- 
rience choose  one  of  their  own  number 
for  an  office  which  he  is  practically  sure 
to  hold  throughout  the  four  college 
years.1  With  few  exceptions,  our  un- 
dergraduate leaders  are  straightforward, 
manly  fellows,  who  will  join  college 
officers  in  any  honest  partnership  for 
the  good  of  one  student  or  of  all,  and 
who  shrink  from  any  kind  of  meanness. 
Want  of  a  fine  sense  of  honor  appears 
chiefly  in  athletic  contests,  in  the  author- 
ship of  written  work,  in  excuses  for  neg- 
lect of  study,  in  the  relation  of  students 
to  the  rights  of  persons  who  are  not  stu- 

1  Class  presidents  are  usually  football  players  ; 
and,  as  a  student  once  observed,  "  When  a  feller 
plays  football,  it  does  n't  take  long  to  find  out  what 
kind  of  a  feller  he  is." 


74      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

dents,  and  in  questions  of  duty  to  all  who 
are,  or  who  are  to  be,  nearest  and  dear- 
est. Here  are  the  discouraging  signs; 
but  even  these  are  a  part  of  that  lop- 
sided immaturity  which  characterizes 
privileged  youth.  It  is  natural,  as  has 
been  said,  for  boys  to  grow  like  colts, 
one  end  at  a  time.  The  pity  is  that  the 
boy,  who  determines  in  a  measure  his 
own  growth,  should  be  so  late  in  devel- 
oping the  power  to  put  himself  into 
another's  place  ;  that  the  best  education 
which  the  country  can  proffer  is  so  slow 
in  teaching  to  the  chosen  youth  of  the 
nation  the  Golden  Rule,  or  even  that  part 
of  the  Golden  Rule  which  results  in 
common  honesty ;  that  the  average  col- 
lege boy,  frank  and  manly  as  he  is,  is 
honest  in  spots,  and  shows  in  his  honesty 
little  sense  of  proportion. 

Take,  for  instance,  that  part  of  college 
life  into  which  the  average  boy  throws 
himself  with  most  enthusiasm,  —  athletic 
sport,  —  and  see  how  far  our  students 


AND    CHARACTER          75 

have  fallen  below  the  ideal  of  honesty, 
how  far  they  still  remain  from  a  clear 
sense  of  proportion.  I  recognize  the 
place  of  strategy  in  athletics ;  and  I  by 
no  means  agree  with  the  gentleman  who 
stigmatized  a  college  catcher  as  "  up  to 
all  the  professional  tricks  "  because  "  he 
made  a  feint  of  throwing  the  ball  in  one 
direction,  and  then  threw  it  in  another : " 
yet  the  necessity  of  trusting  a  game  to 
what  the  umpire  sees  is  deplorable.  A 
whole-souled  and  straightforward  young 
athlete  told  me  once,  with  smiling  good 
humor,  that  a  football  player  in  his  own 
college  (who  had  everybody's  respect) 
owed  his  success  in  the  game  to  a  knack 
of  holding  his  opponent  in  such  a  man- 
ner as  made  his  opponent  seem  to  hold 
him.  Few  college  catchers,  I  suspect, 
systematically  resist  the  temptation  of 
pulling  down  a  "  ball "  to  make  it  look 
like  a  "  strike ; "  and  many  cultivate 
skill  in  this  sleight  of  hand  as  a  cardinal 
point  in  the  game.  Even  players  who 


;6     SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

trip  others,  though  in  public  they  may 
be  hissed,  and  in  private  talked  about 
as  "muckers,"  are  likely  to  remain  in 
the  team,  and  in  some  colleges  may 
become  captains  (whereas  a  Freshman 
who  breaks  training  by  smoking  a  sin- 
gle cigarette  may  be  "queered  "  for  his 
whole  college  course).  Many  ball  play- 
ers use  their  tongues  to  confound  or  ex- 
cite their  adversaries ;  and  whole  armies 
of  students,  supported  by  a  well-mean- 
ing college  press,  make  a  business  of 
"  rattling "  a  rival  team  by  what  ought 
to  be  an  inspiration,  and  not  a  weapon, 
defensive  or  offensive,  — organized  cheer- 
ing. The  youth  who  plays  a  clean  game 
is  admired,  but  not  always  followed; 
and  the  doctrine  of  Mr.  Henry  L.  Hig- 
ginson  and  Mr.  R.  C.  Lehmann,  that  a 
clean  game  comes  first,  and  winning 
comes  second,  though  it  strikes  under- 
graduates as  faultless  in  theory  and  as 
endearing  in  the  men  who  preach  it,  is 
not  always  suffered,  in  a  hard  game,  to 


AND   CHARACTER          77 

interfere  with  "practical  baseball"  or 
"  practical  football,"  —  expressions  used 
among  undergraduates  much  as  "  prac- 
tical politics  "  is  used  among  men  of  the 
world. 

College  dishonesty  in  written  work  is 
hard  to  eradicate,  because  rooted  in  im- 
palpable tradition,  —  that  damaging  tra- 
dition which  exempts  students  from  the 
ordinary  rules  of  right  living,  and  re- 
gards as  venial,  or  even  as  humorous, 
acts  intrinsically  allied  to  those  of  the 
impostor,  the  forger,  and  the  thief.  It 
is  incredible  that  a  youth  of  eighteen 
should  not  see  the  dishonesty  of  hand- 
ing in  as  his  own  work,  for  his  own 
credit,  a  piece  of  writing  which  he  has 
copied  from  a  newspaper  or  from  a 
book,  or  from  the  writing  of  a  fellow 
student,  or  which  he  has  paid  another 
man  to  write  for  him.  Nobody  who 
can  get  into  college  is  so  stupid  that  he 
cannot  see  the  lie  involved.  Everybody 
sees  it  clearly  if  the  writing  is  for  a 


78      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

prize,  and  if  the  fraud  deprives  a  fellow 
student  of  his  fair  chance  ;  but  if  a  youth 
has  spent  all  his  available  time  in  ath- 
letics, or  in  billiards,  or  at  clubs,  or  at 
dances,  or  at  the  theatre,  and  if  a  thesis 
is  due  the  next  day,  what  is  he  to  do  ? 
"  A  man  must  live,"  is  a  common  cry 
of  dishonest  persons  out  of  college ;  and 
"  A  man  must  get  through,"  is  a  suffi- 
cient excuse  for  the  dishonesty  of  stu- 
dents. In  talking  with  these  dishonest 
students,  I  have  been  struck  by  two 
things :  first,  by  their  apparent  inability 
to  see  that  nobody  ever  has  to  hand  in 
anything,  and  that  handing  in  nothing 
is  infinitely  better  than  handing  in  a  dis- 
honest thing;  next,  by  their  feeling  that 
their  own  cases  are  exceptional,  since 
the  wrong  was  done  "under  pressure," 
—  as  if  pressure  did  not  account  for  the 
offences  of  all  amateur  liars  and  forgers. 
In  many  students,  also,  there  remains 
a  trace  of  the  old  feeling  that  to  cheat 
is  one  thing,  and  to  cheat  a  teacher  is 


AND   CHARACTER         79 

another.  Here  is  where  generations  of 
tricky  schoolboys  have  established  a 
practice  as  hard  to  overthrow  by  logic 
as  love  of  country  or  love  of  liquor,  — 
or  anything  else,  good  or  bad,  which  de- 
pends on  custom  and  feeling  rather  than 
on  reason.  We  may  prove  that  it  is 
not  honest  to  call  a  man  we  hate  "  Dear 
Sir,"  or  to  call  ourselves  his  "  very  truly; " 
but  custom  sanctions  it,  and  he  expects 
nothing  better  (or  worse).  We  know 
that  killing  harmless  animals  beyond 
what  can  be  used  as  food  is  wanton  de- 
struction of  life  precious  to  its  posses- 
sors ;  but  good  people  go  on  fishing  and 
shooting.  Just  so,  if  there  is  a  tradition 
that  teachers  are  fair  game,  and  if  the 
leaders  among  boys  so  regard  them, 
there  is  no  social  ostracism  for  dishon- 
esty in  written  work.  Dishonest  boys 
admit  that  an  instructor  who  should 
print  as  his  own  what  his  pupils  after- 
wards discovered  in  an  earlier  publica- 
tion by  another  author  would  be  de- 


8o      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

spised  forever.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  the 
students'  standard  for  the  Faculty  is 
faultlessly  high ;  here,  as  elsewhere,  what 
they  need  is  to  open  their  eyes  to  their 
own  relative  position  among  men,  —  to 
see  that,  if  people  who  cheat  them  are 
liars,  they  themselves,  whatever  their 
social  self-complacency,  are  liars  also  if 
they  cheat  other  people.  I  would  not 
give  the  impression  that  most  students 
cheat  or  fail  to  condemn  cheating,  or  that 
colleges  are  not  making  steady  progress 
toward  a  higher  sense  of  honor  in  this 
matter  which  would  be  clear  to  a  right- 
minded  child  of  ten.  I  mean  merely 
that,  whereas  outside  of  college  (and  the 
custom  house)  the  act  of  obvious  dis- 
honesty commonly  puts  the  man  into 
bad  repute,  among  undergraduates  the 
man  often  brings  the  act  into  better 
repute  by  elevating  it  socially ;  and  that 
this  is  a  disgrace  to  an  institution  which 
counts  as  its  members  the  chosen  youth 
of  an  enlightened  country.  In  this  mat- 


AND   CHARACTER         81 

ter,  it  is  encouraging  to  note  the  feeling 
of  the  better  students  in  Mr.  Flandrau's 
clever  Diary  of  a  Freshman;  yet  even 
there  the  offence  carries  with  it  little  or 
nothing  of  social  condemnation.  It  is 
encouraging,  also,  to  note  the  success  of 
the  so-called  "  honor  system  "  in  schools 
and  colleges  which  have  adopted  it,  and 
the  ostracism  of  those  students  who  have 
proved  false  to  it.  For  myself,  I  cannot 
see  why  a  proctor  in  the  examination 
room  is  more  than  a  reasonable  safe- 
guard, or  why  his  presence  there  should 
be  more  offensive  than  that  of  a  police- 
man in  the  street,  —  to  a  student  honest 
and  mature.  It  is  only  boys  (whatever 
their  age)  who  take  umbrage  when  a  man 
counts  their  change,  or  verifies  their 
assertions,  or  audits  their  accounts,  or 
refuses  without  security  to  cash  their 
checks,  or  refuses  to  please  them  by  tes- 
tifying to  what  he  does  not  know.  You 
may  believe  in  a  boy  through  and 
through,  and  by  showing  your  belief  in 


82      SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

him  you  may  help  him  to  be  honest; 
but  your  belief  in  him  does  not  warrant 
your  official  testimony  that  he  has  suc- 
cessfully completed  a  certain  work,  if 
you  have  no  evidence  but  his  own  de- 
claration and  the  silence  of  his  fellows. 
Moreover,  so  far  as  my  experience  goes, 
the  hotbeds  of  college  cheating  are 
not  the  important  examinations  superin- 
tended by  proctors;  they  are  written 
"  quizzes  "  in  the  crowded  classroom,  or 
themes,  theses,  forensics,  compositions  in 
foreign  languages,  mathematical  prob- 
lems, —  any  kind  of  written  work  done 
out  of  the  classroom ;  and  in  all  these 
latter  cases  the  students,,  whether  they 
know  it  or  not,  are  "put  on  their  honor." 
Theoretically,  though  in  a  doubtful  case 
I  should  always  accept  the  word  of  a 
suspected  student,  I  object  to  the  honor 
system  as  nursing  a  false  sensitiveness 
that  resents  a  kind  of  supervision  which 
everybody  must  sooner  or  later  accept, 
and  as  taking  from  the  degree  some  part 


AND   CHARACTER         83 

of  its  sanction.  If  a  student  vouches 
for  his  own  examinations,  why,  it  has 
been  asked,  should  he  not  sign  his  own 
diploma,  and  stand  on  his  honor  before 
the  world  as  he  has  stood  on  it  before 
the  Faculty?  Yet,  practically,  I  am 
told,  the  honor  system  bids  fair,  where 
it  has  been  adopted,  "to  revolutionize 
the  whole  spirit  of  undergraduate  inter- 
course with  the  Faculty."  It  is,  at  any 
rate,  as  one  of  my  correspondents  says, 
a  "  systematic  endeavor  by  undergradu- 
ates themselves  to  establish  a  much  bet- 
ter moral  code  in  relation  to  written 
work,"  and  is  therefore  "an  immense 
moral  gain  in  itself."  Besides,  I  have 
yet  to  meet  a  single  man  who  has  lived 
under  the  honor  system  (as  I  have  not) 
who  does  not  give  it,  in  spite,  perhaps, 
of  a  priori  scepticism,  his  absolute  faith. 
Sound  or  unsound,  the  honor  system  has 
in  it  signs  of  hope. 

The  notion  that   makeshifts  and  ex- 
cuses in  place  of  attendance  and  work 


84      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

are  different  at  college  from  what  they 
are  elsewhere  is  another  aspect  of  the 
tradition  to  which  I  have  referred.  Able- 
bodied  youths  are  afflicted  with  diseases 
that  admit  all  pleasures  and  forbid  all 
duties,  and  if  questioned  closely  are  of- 
fended because  their  word  is  not  accepted 
promptly  and  in  full,  even  when  it  is 
obviously  of  little  worth.  The  dissipa- 
tion of  a  night  brings  the  headache  of  a 
morning;  and  the  student  excuses  him- 
self as  too  sick  for  college  work.  On 
the  day  before  a  ball  and  on  the  day 
after  it,  a  severe  cold  prevents  a  student 
from  attendance  at  college  exercises ;  but 
he  goes  to  the  ball.  Many  undergrad- 
uates treat  their  academic  engagements 
in  a  way  that  would  lose  them  positions 
at  any  business  house  inside  of  a  week ; 
yet  no  remorse  affects  their  appetites  or 
their  sleep.  In  this  world,  by  the  way, 
it  is  not  the  just  who  sleep;  it  is  the 
irresponsible. 

The  openness  with  which  these  worth- 


AND   CHARACTER         85 

less  excuses  are  offered  is  a  sign  that  the 
trouble  is  perverted  vision  rather  than 
radical  moral  obliquity.  An  ingenuous 
youth,  prevented  by  a  cold  from  going 
to  college  exercises,  stood  on  a  windy 
ball  field  one  raw  day  in  the  spring,  and, 
unabashed,  coached  his  men  before  the 
eyes  of  the  officer  whose  business  it  was 
to  call  him  to  account.  Another  insisted 
to  the  same  officer  that  a  mark  of  absence 
against  him  in  a  large  lecture  course  was 
a  mistake;  and  when  told  that  it  was 
not,  exclaimed  with  honest  warmth, 
"  Then  the  fellow  who  promised  to  sit 
in  my  seat  did  n't  do  it !  "  Both  of  these 
boys  were  blinded  by  the  tradition  which 
nearly  all  college  literature  has  fostered, 
and  which  nothing  but  eternal  vigilance 
and  constant  and  prolonged  care  can  de- 
stroy. It  is  this  tradition  which  led  a 
professor  to  say,  "  Students  who  won't 
lie  to  an  individual  will  lie  to  the  college 
office ;  it  is  a  soulless,  impersonal  thing." 
Another  aspect  of  this  same  compre- 


86       SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

hensive  tradition  is  the  enthusiasm  of 
some  Freshmen  for  stealing  signs.  There 
was,  indeed,  a  time  when  timid  Fresh- 
men bought  signs,  to  have  the  reputation 
of  "  ragging  "  them.  The  word  "  rag," 
as  I  have  said  elsewhere,  is  more  local, 
more  specific,  and,  when  applied  to  our 
own  acts  or  to  those  of  our  friends,  less 
embarrassing  than  the  word  "  steal."  No 
doubt  the  college  stealer  of  signs,  whether 
youth  or  maiden,  steals  for  fun,  and  has 
not  the  same  motive  as  the  common 
thief;  yet  the  motive,  as  I  see  it,  is  no 
higher.  The  implied  general  proposition 
at  the  root  of  the  act  is  the  proposition 
that  students'  privileges  include  the  privi- 
lege of  disregarding  the  rights  of  others ; 
the  assumption  that  the  world,  of  which 
so  much  is  bestowed  on  them,  is  theirs, 
—  to  disport  themselves  in.  Sometimes 
the  stealing  takes  the  form  of  destroying 
property  (breaking  glass,  for  instance) ; 
sometimes  of  robbing  the  very  mother 
who  shelters  the  robber.  "Do  you  re- 


AND    CHARACTER          87 

member  what  fun  we  had  burning  that 
pile  of  lumber  in  front  of  Matthews 
Hall  ?  "  said  a  middle-aged  clergyman 
to  a  classmate.  Yet  Matthews  Hall  was 
a  generous  gift  to  the  University ;  and 
the  students  who  destroyed  the  lumber 
were  picking  the  pocket  of  a  benefac- 
tor or  of  the  Alma  Mater  herself.  De- 
struction of  property  is  often  an  attempt 
to  celebrate  athletic  success  ;  it  is,  if  the 
phrase  is  pardonable,  an  ebullition  of 
misfit  loyalty  to  the  college  whose  pro- 
perty is  sacrificed,  as  if  the  son  of  a 
successful  candidate  for  the  presidency 
of  the  United  States  should  celebrate  his 
father's  victory  by  burning  down  his  fa- 
ther's house.  Sometimes  undergraduates 
"  pinch  "  bits  of  college  property  as  tro- 
phies, just  as  modern  pilgrims  have 
shown  their  respect  for  the  Pilgrim  Fa- 
thers by  chipping  off  pieces  of  Plymouth 
Rock.  These  kinds  of  college  dishon- 
esty are  happily  lessening,  and  are  re- 
garded as  pardonable  in  Freshmen  only, 


88      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

—  as  evidence  of  "  freshness  "  pure  and 
simple.  That  they  exist  at  all  is  not 
merely  a  scandal  to  the  good  name  of 
the  college,  but  a  menace  to  its  prosper- 
ity. The  few  foolish  boys  who  are  guilty 
of  them  stand  in  the  unthinking  public 
mind  for  the  noble  universities  which 
they  misrepresent,  until  irritated  trades- 
men and  city  governments  forget  what 
the  college  does  for  the  community,  and 
view  it  merely  as  a  rich  corporation  that 
escapes  taxes  and  fills  the  city  with  inso- 
lent and  dishonest  youth.  The  irrespon- 
sibility of  some  students  in  money  mat- 
ters, their  high-minded  indignation  if  a 
tradesman  to  whom  they  have  owed 
money  for  years  demands  it  in  a  manner 
that  does  not  meet  their  fancy,  increases 
the  irritation ;  and  incalculable  damage 
is  done. 

After  all,  the  most  serious  aspect  of 
college  dishonesty  is  the  dishonesty  of 
vice.  Many  persons  who  condemn  vice 
believe  nevertheless  that  it  belongs  with 


AND   CHARACTER          89 

a  character  which,  though  its  strength  is 
perverted,  is  open  and  hearty ;  and  now 
and  then  this  belief  seems  justified:  but 
those  who  see  at  close  range  the  effects 
of  vice  remember  that  bound  up  with 
most  of  it  is,  and  must  be,  faithlessness 
to  father  and  mother,  and  to  the  wife 
and  children  who  are  soon  to  be.  College 
sentiment  condemns  habitual  vice.  Like 
the  sentiment  of  the  world  at  large,  it  is 
lenient  (to  men  only)  in  occasional  lapses 
from  virtue,  —  unless  a  lapse  involves 
a  breach  of  athletic  training.  Here  too 
we  mark  that  want  of  proportion  which 
characterizes  undergraduate  judgments 
of  college  honor.  The  youth  who  squan- 
ders in  vice  the  money  which  his  father, 
at  a  sacrifice,  has  sent  him  for  his  term 
bill  may  be  a  good  fellow  yet;  the 
youth  who  breaks  training  is  a  disgrace 
to  his  Alma  Mater. 

In  dwelling  on  certain  kinds  of  col- 
lege dishonesty,  I  have  not  forgotten  that 
in  some  respects  the  college  sense  of 


9o      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

honor  is  the  keenest  in  the  community, 
and  that  no  higher  ideal  can  be  found  on 
earth  than  in  the  best  thought  of  our 
best  universities.  What  I  have  pointed 
out  must  be  taken  as  stray  survivals  of 
an  intensely  vital  tradition,  —  survivals 
which  in  a  democracy  like  our  own  have 
no  right  to  be.  The  public  sentiment  of 
our  colleges  is  becoming,  year  by  year, 
cleaner  and  clearer-sighted.  We  move 
forward,  and  not  slowly.  What  makes 
some  persons  impatient  is  the  need  of 
teaching  to  the  picked  young  men  of 
America  that  a  lie  is  a  lie,  whoever  tells 
it,  and  a  theft  a  theft,  whoever  commits 
it;  and  that  a  college  student,  though 
he  gains  more  blessings  than  his  neigh- 
bor, does  not  gain  thereby  the  right  to 
appropriate  his  neighbor's  goods.  In  our 
impatience,  we  forget  that  to  teach  an 
axiom  takes  years  and  generations  if  the 
axiom  contradicts  tradition;  and  we  for- 
get that,  when  all  is  said,  our  under- 
graduates themselves  are  constantly  pu- 
rifying and  uplifting  college  honor. 


AND   CHARACTER         91 


IV 


SOME  ASPECTS  OF  GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 
TRAINING  l 

WHOEVER  looks  into  systems 
of  education  is  almost  sure  to 
see  something  that  needs  reform,  and  is 
inclined  to  believe  that  the  methods  of 
his  own  day  are  all  wrong.  Thus  it  has 
come  to  pass  that  every  year  or  every 
month,  according  to  the  degree  of  pro- 
gressiveness  in  the  community,  new  theo- 
ries of  education  are  sprung  on  us,  and, 
it  may  be,  tried  on  our  children.  Now, 
as  everybody  knows,  it  is  ten  times  as 
easy  to  destroy  as  to  reconstruct,  and  a 
hundred  times  as  easy  to  find  fault  as  to 
suggest  practicable  and  wise  and  durable 

1  A  paper  read  before  the  Department  of  Super- 
intendence (National  Educational  Association)  at 
Chicago,  February,  1901. 


92      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

improvement.  The  history  of  education, 
like  the  history  of  the  world,  is  a  history 
of  countless  mistakes,  with  much  noble 
effort  and  many  noble  results.  There  is 
no  reason  why  education  should  not  ad- 
mit new  light  as  other  sciences  admit  it, 
—  as  medicine,  for  example,  admits  it; 
but  reform  in  education  has  been,  and 
still  is,  alloyed  with  religious  prejudice, 
with  politics,  and  with  personal  power 
and  whim,  till  in  our  less  hopeful  mo- 
ments the  education  of  boys  and  girls 
seems  the  stamping-ground  of  experi- 
ment and  fad.  In  these  experiments  for 
the  enlightenment  of  colleges  and  schools 
we  sometimes  forget  the  oldest  and  the 
best  truths  of  education  itself. 

From  Milton,  though  parts  of  his  one 
pamphlet  on  education  are  an  astound- 
ing example  of  the  reformer's  lack  of 
practical  sense,  we  may  get  as  good  a 
definition  as  has  ever  been  devised.  "  I 
call  a  complete  and  generous  education," 
says  Milton,  "  that  which  fits  a  man  to 


AND   CHARACTER        93 

perform  justly,  skilfully,  and  magnani- 
mously all  the  offices,  both  private  and 
public,  of  peace  and  war."  Accepting 
this  definition,  I  come  with  an  old  story, 
a  story  which  I  have  told  before,  and 
must  tell  the  worse  when  I  try  to  put 
it  into  new  language ;  a  story,  therefore, 
which  here  and  there  I  shall  let  other 
people  tell  for  me. 

At  the  start,  I  must  disclaim  any  inside 
knowledge  of  school  systems ;  and  for 
this  reason  it  may  seem  that  I  ought  not 
to  speak  of  school  systems  at  all.  My 
excuse  is  twofold,  —  the  a  priori  princi- 
ple in  the  relation  of  hard  work  to  solid 
success,  and  the  unmistakable  signs  that 
in  modern  theories  of  education  this 
principle  is  often  slighted  or  ignored. 
In  a  certain  sense  I  speak  as  an  outsider, 
yet  as  an  outsider  who  has,  and  who 
feels  his  right  to  have,  a  conviction, — 
a  conviction  that  the  end  of  the  Ameri- 
can public  school  is  to  insure  the  intel- 
lectual discipline  which  is  itself  a  moral 


94       SCHOOL,    COLLEGE, 

force,  and  which  may  point  for  its  result 
to  an  educated  nation. 

The  first  lesson  of  education  is  the 
lesson  of  getting  down  to  hard  work, 
and  doing  the  work  thoroughly.  It  may 
be  learned  by  a  boy  or  girl  who  never 
goes  to  school,  learned  in  a  mill  or  on 
a  farm;  but  the  highest  work  in  this 
part  of  the  world  must  commonly  be 
done  by  people  who  for  a  greater  or  less 
number  of  years  have  spent  the  best  part 
of  at  least  five  days  out  of  seven  for  some 
forty  weeks  a  year  in  what  we  call  edu- 
cation. The  first  business  of  a  school 
is  to  teach  concentration,  application, 
power  of  tackling  intellectual  work,  — 
qualities  which  sooner  or  later  a  man 
must  have  if  he  is  to  succeed  in  life,  and 
which  he  got  in  his  boyhood  if  he  had 
the  right  kind  of  parents,  was  the  right 
kind  of  boy,  and  went  to  the  right  kind 
of  school.  (I  speak  of  boys.  I  bid 
good-by  to  the  girls  here  and  now,  leav- 
ing them  to  be  "  understood  "  through- 
out most  of  what  I  have  to  say.) 


AND   CHARACTER         95 

Some  of  us,  now  in  middle  life,  recall 
the  days  when,  as  one  of  my  old  neigh- 
bors puts  it,  "  we  were  on  earth  the  first 
time ; "  and  we  recall  the  grammar  schools 
of  those  days,  —  the  bare  walls,  the  single 
dictionary  as  the  library  of  each  room, 
and  the  curriculum,  which  nobody  had 
dreamt  of"  enriching ; "  reading,  writing, 
spelling,  arithmetic  (quite  enough  arith- 
metic), English  grammar,  and  Quack- 
enbos's  History  of  the  United  States ; 
nothing  to  attract  the  eye,  no  festivity 
except  at  recess,  no  music,  no  intellec- 
tual food  outside  of  the  curriculum  ex- 
cept an  occasional  address  of  five  minutes 
by  a  more  or  less  illiterate  mayor  and  an 
occasional  question  from  a  rather  bashful 
superintendent  (those  were  early  days). 
For  discipline,  besides  a  flogging  now 
and  then,  the  boy  who  turned  his  head 
round  to  the  boy  behind  him  had  to 
stand  on  the  platform  with  a  spring 
clothespin  on  his  nose  till  he  saw  an- 
other boy  turn  his  head  and  transferred 
the  clothespin  to  him. 


96      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

Such  education  had  its  drawbacks, 
moral,  intellectual,  and  above  all  aes- 
thetic :  yet  some  of  us  may  well  look  back 
to  it  as  the  surest  and  truest  discipline 
of  our  lives ;  for  we  were  taught  to  work. 
Sometimes,  if  you  are  to  turn  a  college 
loafer  into  a  man,  you  send  him  to  a 
factory,  with  long  and  early  hours,  and 
immediate  responsibility  to  an  officer. 
You  do  this  because  his  salvation  is 
work,  and  because,  blind  as  he  now  is 
to  the  beauty  of  the  intellectual  work 
that  he  may  do,  he  needs  to  be  educated 
by  manual  labor  that  he  must  do.  You 
give  him  work  as  education.  All  educa- 
tion is  work.  This  obvious  but  endan- 
gered doctrine  is  what  I  am  here  to 
preach. 

"  Work,"  says  Bushnell,  "  is  activity 
for  an  end ;  play  activity  as  an  end. 
One  prepares  the  fund  or  resources  of 
enjoyment ;  the  other  is  enjoyment  it- 
self. When  a  man  goes  into  agriculture, 
trade,  or  the  shop,  he  consents  to  under- 


AND   CHARACTER         97 

take  a  certain  expenditure  of  care  and 
labor,  which  is  only  a  form  of  painstaking 
(rightly  named),  in  order  to  obtain  some 
ulterior  good  which  is  to  be  his  reward ; 
but  when  a  child  goes  to  his  play,  it  is 
no  painstaking,  no  means  to  an  end:  it 
is  itself,  rather,  both  end  and  joy." 

Now  the  tendency  of  education  in  this 
country  is  to  turn  work  into  play,  just  as 
the  tendency  of  outdoor  games  in  this 
country  is  to  turn  play  into  work.  For 
early  education  we  have  the  kindergar- 
ten ;  for  football  we  have  relentless  train- 
ing. Have  you  ever  thought  of  one 
reason  why  athletics  in  American  col- 
leges mean  so  much?  It  is  athletics  in 
which  many  a  youth,  pampered  at  home 
and  at  school,  gets  his  only  taste  of  the 
stern  discipline  without  which  he  cannot 
be  a  man.  His  studies  he  evades,  and 
his  friends  pardon  the  evasion  ;  his  foot- 
ball he  cannot  evade,  or  he  is  branded 
as  a  "  quitter,"  as  "  soft,"  or  "  sandless." 
From  his  studies  he  gets  more  or  less 


98       SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

culture,  but  no  backbone ;  from  his  foot- 
ball he  gets  the  stuff  and  substance  of 
his  education.  The  business  man  often 
prefers  in  his  office  a  successful  college 
athlete  to  a  successful  college  scholar ; 
for  the  athlete,  as  the  business  man  says, 
"has  done  something." 

The  public  school  should  have  at  least 
as  much  educational  power  as  football. 
Setting  aside  the  question  of  manual 
training,  a  question  of  great  importance 
to  many  boys,  and  speaking  of  a  gram- 
mar school,  I  believe  that  the  business 
of  the  grammar  school  is  to  teach  a  few 
subjects,  essential  or  of  prime  impor- 
tance, and,  in  teaching  them,  to  give  the 
training  which  enables  people  "to  do 
things."  The  grammar  school  is  for  the 
greatest  good  of  the  greatest  number. 
If  we  are  inclined  to  condemn  it  for 
ignoring  the  individual,  we  should  re- 
member that  strength  may  come  to  the 
individual  from  being  ignored,  from  be- 
ing treated  as  one  among  many  who  are 


AND   CHARACTER         99 

treated  and  trained  alike.  Individual 
education  is  the  right  of  a  man ;  to  a  less 
degree  it  is  the  right  of  a  youth ;  to  some 
degree  it  is  the  right  of  everybody  :  but 
everybody  has  also  that  other  right  of 
education  in  common  with  his  equals, 
his  superiors,  and  even  with  his  inferiors, 
education  in  which  he  may  see  the  effect 
of  teaching  on  a  variety  of  minds,  each 
different  from  his  own,  and  may  learn 
from  his  fellows  as  they  may  learn  from 
him. 

Again  and  again  I  have  seen,  in  col- 
lege, students  who  have  become  almost 
hopelessly  debilitated  from  excessive  at- 
tention to  their  individual  needs,  —  or, 
rather,  to  what  their  parents  have  believed 
to  be  their  individual  needs ;  who  have 
never  known  the  stimulus  of  competi- 
tion ;  whose  sharp  corners  have  been 
carefully  sharpened  more  and  more,  and 
never  rounded  off;  the  bent  of  whose 
minds  has  been  followed  till  their  minds 
have  lost  all  power  of  attention  and  con- 


zoo      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

centration,  —  unless  something  new  has 
come  to  fascinate  them,  so  that  their  very 
attention  has  seemed  a  weakness  rather 
than  a  strength,  a  yielding  of  the  mind 
rather  than  a  conquering  by  the  mind. 
The  business  of  the  grammar  school  is 
not  to  follow  the  mind,  but  to  lead  it ; 
nor  is  it  to  entertain  or  amuse,  though 
a  good  teacher  will  entertain  and  amuse 
incidentally ;  nor  is  it  to  teach  so  many 
things  that  none  can  be  taught  well.  It 
is  to  drill  and  drill  and  drill ;  to  teach 
accuracy,  concentration,  self-command, 
so  that  he  who  has  been  faithful  in  a  few 
things  may  be  fit,  with  increasing  years 
and  ripening  powers,  to  be  ruler  over 
many  things.  In  the  grammar  school 
few  subjects  are  essential.  Chief  among 
these  is  the  use  of  the  English  language. 
If  enough  sensible  trainers  of  the  voice 
could  be  found,  I  should  be  tempted  to 
add  elocution.  Who  does  not  know  the 
strained,  high  voice  of  a  reciting  child 
or  of  a  chiding  schoolmistress  *?  Who 


AND    CHARACTER       101 

that  has  to  use  his  voice  in  a  large  room 
does  not  know  the  weariness  of  not  using 
it  well  ?  A  little  mathematics,  a  little 
geography  and  history,  possibly  a  little 
physics,  and  a  great  deal  of  reading, 
writing,  and  speaking  in  the  English 
tongue,  —  these  things  well  taught  make 
a  foundation  on  which  any  structure  of 
intellectual  education  may  safely  rest 
Narrow,  if  you  will,  but  about  as  wide 
as  a  child's  foundation  can  be  laid  and 
laid  firmly.  A  few  fundamental  studies 
with  the  habit  of  mastering  the  work  in 
hand  are  an  infinitely  better  basis  for  the 
child  than  a  heterogeneous  collection  of 
half-learned,  cultivating  diversions,  over 
which  he  may  sprawl,  but  on  which  he 
can  never  stand.  A  few  studies  rightly 
taught  are  the  first  intellectual  step  toward 
"  that  which  fits  a  man  to  perform  justly, 
skilfully,  and  magnanimously  all  the  of- 
fices, both  private  and  public,  of  peace 
and  war."  Sometimes  people  complain 
of  drill  as  benumbing  the  mind  of  a  child; 


102      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

and  the  complaint,  if  the  child  is  young 
and  the  drill  severe,  has  foundation.  Yet 
these  same  persons  fail  to  see  how  de- 
moralizing to  the  mind  of  a  child  an 
excessive  number  of  studies  may  be. 
Children,  as  everybody  knows,  love  re- 
petition in  their  amusements,  and  can 
stand  much  more  of  it  in  their  instruc- 
tion than  their  elders  can.  By  multi- 
plying the  subjects  which  we  set  before 
them,  we  run  the  risk,  not  merely  of 
dissipating  their  minds,  but  of  overstim- 
ulating  them.  I  do  not  mean  that  even 
a  grammar  school  should  ignore  the 
value  of  variety ;  and  I  am  glad  that 
music  is  now  taught  in  our  public 
schools.  I  mean  much  what  a  corre- 
spondent of  mine  meant  when  he  wrote : 
"  I  would  have  a  boy  use  the  English 
language  decently,  even  if  he  loses  the 
opportunity  to  study  German  in  the 
grammar  school."  What  threatens  our 
early  education  nowadays  is  the  amuse- 
ment and  variety  theory.  Working  up- 


AND   CHARACTER        log 

ward  from  the  kindergarten,  it  bids  fair 
to  weaken  the  intellect  and  to  sap  the 
will.*  A  well-known  teacher  in  Boston 
had  no  difficulty  in  picking  out  the 
members  of  his  school  who  had  begun 
their  education  in  the  kindergarten ;  and 
he  picked  them  out  because  of  a  weak- 
ness in  their  intellectual  processes.  There 
are  exceptions  and  notable  ones ;  and 
there  is,  as  everybody  knows,  a  lovely 
side  to  the  kindergarten :  but  the  danger 
of  the  kindergarten  principle  is  felt  by 
many  a  teacher  who  hardly  dares  hint 
at  it.  An  elective  system  in  college 
gives  a  noble  liberty  to  the  man  who  has 
been  so  trained  that  he  can  use  his  liberty 
wisely ;  but  when  an  elective  system  goes 
lower  and  lower  into  our  schools  till  it 
meets  children  who  have  been  amused 
through  the  years  in  which  they  should 
have  been  educated,  what  chance  have 
these  children  for  the  best  thing  in  edu- 
cation ? 


104      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

"  On  a  huge  hill 
Cragged  and  steep,  Truth  stands  ;  and  he  that  will 

Reach  her  about  must,  and  about  it  go, 
And  what  th'  hill's  suddenness  resists,  win  so." 

That  I  am  not  fighting  shadows  or 
knocking  down  men  of  straw,  the  testi- 
mony of  a  hundred  teachers  and  parents 
makes  clear.  The  amusement  theory, 
starting  in  an  honest  and  benignant  de- 
sire to  show  children  the  beauty  of  the 
world  about  them  and  to  rouse  their 
interest  in  study,  especially  in  the  study 
of  nature,  may  end  with  the  sacrifice  of 
strength  in  the  pupil  and  of  truth  in  the 
teacher ;  may  become  a  sweetmeat  theory, 
giving  the  children  food  which  debilitates 
and  deranges  the  organs  that  crave  it. 

Certainly  the  education  of  boys  should 
not  be  a  bore  and  a  bugbear,  nor  should  it 
ignore  culture.  Yet  the  culture  should 
not  crowd  out  training ;  it  should  rather 
be  atmospheric :  it  should  come  to  the 
boy  from  the  finer,  maturer,  and  more 
sensitive  character  of  his  teacher;  it 


AND   CHARACTER        105 

should  take  little  visible  or  tangible  part 
in  the  school  programme ;  it  should 
pervade  the  whole.  In  the  best  teacher, 
also,  is  a  personal  force  that  inspires 
some  boys  with  the  desire  to  work  and 
compels  others  to  work,  till  working  be- 
comes a  precious,  even  a  priceless,  habit 
of  their  lives.  He  is  not  full  of  devices 
and  patent  appliances  for  interesting  his 
pupils ;  he  is  not  full  of  theories  and 
fads :  he  does  his  own  work,  even  the 
drudgery  of  it,  with  enthusiasm  for  it  and 
for  his  calling.  He  corrects,  chastens, 
guides,  kindles  the  love  of  learning;  and 
constantly  he  gives  to  eager  eyes  some 
glimpses  of  that  high  enjoyment  to  which 
learning  and  discipline  may  lead :  but 
he  never  sacrifices  the  discipline  to  any 
royal  road  of  pleasure. 

This  is  another  way  of  saying  that  the 
good  teacher  does  not  sacrifice  truth  "  to 
make  things  interesting."  I  have  lately 
read  an  admirable  paper  by  Miss  Soule, 
of  Brookline,  Mass.,  on  the  foolish  un- 


io6     SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

truthfulness  of  some  books  designed  to 
interest  children  in  nature.  Miss  Soule 
cites  a  well-known  superintendent  of 
public  schools  who  maintains  that  plants, 
if  they  are  to  interest  children,  "  must  be 
instinct  with  human  attributes ;  "  and  to 
illustrate  his  theory  (about  animals  as  well 
as  plants)  she  has  collected  from  books 
for  children  a  good  many  specimens 
of  biological  mendacity.  Children,  she 
says,  are  taught  that  "  the  kind  cow  " 
gives  them  her  milk ;  that  "  a  plant  does 
not  like  to  send  its  young,  delicate  leaves 
and  flowers  into  the  cold  world  without 
wrapping  them  up,  any  more  than  your 
mother  would  like  to  send  your  baby 
brother  out  for  the  first  time  without  a 
great  deal  of  such  bundling  up ; "  that 
the  queen  bee  "  is  very  generous  to  the 
young  queen,  who  of  course  is  her  own 
daughter,  and  leaves  all  the  furniture  and 
silver  spoons  and  everything  of  that  sort 
behind."  "  What,"  says  Miss  Soule,  "  is 
gained  by  this  ?  "  She  tells  the  effect 


AND    CHARACTER        107 

of  it  on  two  children.  One,  who  was  lit- 
eral, said  :  "  Why,  she  could  n't  leave 
furniture  and  silver  spoons,  because  she 
did  n't  have  any  to  leave.  That  is  not 
a  very  true  book,  is  it  ?  "  Another,  and 
brighter,  child  exclaimed  :  "  How  silly 
that  is  !  It  is  so  stupid  to  pretend  things 
like  that  when  they  could  not  ever  be." 
"  Yet,"  says  Miss  Soule,  "  this  child  is 
very  imaginative,  delights  in  fairy  tales, 
and  lived  Alice  in  Wonderland  for 
weeks."  Imaginative  literature  may  do 
what  it  likes  with  plants  and  animals. 
Alice  in  Wonderland,  though  she  may 
not  teach  children  respectful  manners, 
cannot  teach  them  biological  untruth. 
Mr.  Kipling's  Rikki  Tikki  Tavi  is  one 
of  the  best  stories  in  the  English  language 
for  old  or  young ;  and  his  Toomai  of  the 
Elephants  has  a  poetic  beauty  which  it 
is  a  distinction  for  a  child  to  feel.  Im- 
aginative literature  is  one  thing,  and 
books  for  instruction  are  quite  another. 
Yet  one  teacher  cited  to  Miss  Soule  that 


io8     SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

dismal  joke  about  the  queen  bee  and  the 
silver  spoons  as  "  so  taking,  so  cute  ! " 
"  This  method  of  awakening  interest," 
says  Miss  Soule,  "  puts  child  and  animals 
into  false  relations,  and  nothing  is  gained 
by  it  except  possibly  an  added  interest  on 
the  part  of  the  child.  Since  this  interest 
is  based  upon  conditions  which  do  not 
exist,  the  child  has  no  right  to  it.  The 
animals  are  not  interesting  in  that  way" 
In  the  same  paper  Miss  Soule  compares 
"  soft  pedagogics  "  with  peptonized  food. 
After  reading  Miss  Soule's  paper,  one 
of  the  best  graduates  of  one  of  the  best 
kindergarten  schools  wrote  to  the  author 
that  she  (the  teacher)  "  was  circulating 
that  paper  among  all  the  teachers  she 
knew,  because  it  had  shown  her  that  she 
and  the  other  kindergarten  teachers  were 
doing  dishonest  work  for  the  sake  of 
ease  and  arousing  interest,  and  that  the 
modern  schoolbooks  all  tended  to  in- 
crease this  dishonesty."  "  It  is  better," 
said  an  American  humorist,  "not  to 


AND   CHARACTER       109 

know  so  much  than  to  know  so  many 
things  that  ain't  so." 

An  able  teacher  in  Boston,  struggling 
against  what  she  believes  to  be  debilitat- 
ing methods  in  the  education  of  to-day, 
writes  of  her  own  work  as  "  an  uphill, 
out-of-date  attempt  to  keep  a  simple, 
healthy  school ; "  and  adds  that  in  the 
attempt  she  is  "constantly  losing  her 
grip  on  the  Back  Bay."  From  another 
teacher  of  long  experience,  who  writes 
about  modern  methods  of  teaching  lan- 
guages, I  quote  at  some  length  :  — 

"Since  the  attack  on  the  old  system 
of  teaching  languages,  English  as  well  as 
Latin  and  Greek,  became  effective  in  an 
iconoclastic  sense,  and  ineffective  in  the 
way  of  suggesting  a  better  system,  the 
teacher  in  the  secondary  schools  has  been 
swamped  in  what  I,  remembering  my 
friends'  experiences  with  Dr.  Sauveur 
many  years  ago,  have  been  inclined  to 
call  Sauveurism.  Sauveurism  in  teach- 
ing, you  will  remember,  spread  rapidly, 


no      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

attacked  many  college  centres,  and  in- 
fected violently  the  opponents  of  the 
classical  system.  It  was  for  a  time  hailed 
as  the  true  scientific  treatment  of  all  lan- 
guage study,  and  it  really  had  in  it  one 
element  of  true  scientific  method,  the 
cumulative  gathering  of  facts  on  which 
to  theorize ;  but  the  gathering  of  facts 
proved  in  the  main  to  be  desultory 
and  the  theories  nebulous  and  valueless. 
This  Sauveur  rage,  while  it  had  its  good 
side  in  practical  training  for  the  spoken 
language,  struck  at  the  root  of  all  sound 
scientific  method  in  language  study. 
The  good  in  it  was  as  old  as  the  hills, 
and  was  already  as  effectively  used  in 
good  schools  of  the  classical  order  as  it 
ever  was  by  Sauveur.  The  evil  in  it  was 
its  claim  that  a  no-system  was  better 
than  a  system.  It  threw  out  what  was 
known  and  classified.  Where  true  sci- 
ence teaches  by  rule  and  tests  by  experi- 
ment, this  held  that  cumulative  labora- 
tory work  was  all  in  all.  The  Sauveur 


AND   CHARACTER       in 

method  was  the  first  wild  attempt  to 
replace  with  a  working  system  the  old 
grammatical  training  of  the  schools.  It 
failed  and  is  forgotten.  Taking  what 
was  good  in  it,  —  not  from  Sauveur,  but 
from  the  old  methods,  as  old  as  the  hills, 
—  a  few  practical  teachers,  like  Daniell 
and  Collar,  themselves  trained  in  the  old 
schools,  have  reintroduced  good  gram- 
matical work  in  Latin  and  Greek  instruc- 
tion. This  is  elementary  training  only, 
but  it  serves  to  shorten  the  period  of 
drudgery  and  open  up  early  the  rich 
stores  of  Latin  and  Greek  literature, 
—  stores  to  be  best  enjoyed  without  the 
excess  of  annotation  and  cross-reference 
which  some  of  the  literature  specialists 
are  attaching  to  our  English  classics  in- 
tended for  schools.  English  grammar 
also  has  its  method  and  should,  I  believe, 
be  taught  early  and  thoroughly, —  the  dry 
details  not  shunned.  In  getting  these 
the  memory  may  receive  as  exact  a 
training  as  it  used  to  get  in  the  old  [Bos- 


ii2     SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

ton]  Latin  School  under  Gardner.  Once 
bedded  in  the  mind,  the  grammatical 
details  should  be  allowed  to  repose  there, 
as  well  forgotten  as  the  flower  seed  is 
forgotten  when  the  blossom  is  sweet  in 
the  winds.  If  they  are  stirred  again,  as 
the  young  college  specialists  (not  the 
best  of  them)  are  stirring  them,  I  believe 
the  mind  will  never  acquire  that  fine 
sense  of  literary  charm  that  used  to  be 
acquired  under  Channing  and  Child.  I 
have  recalled  Sauveur,  only  because  he 
stands  in  my  memory  as  the  bete  noire  of 
some  years  of  my  life  spent  in  teaching 
English  and  the  classics.  But  he  has 
passed  and  is  forgotten.  Other  fads  have 
taken  the  place  of  his  in  language  and 
other  studies." 

This  teacher  expresses  "doubt  as  to 
the  robustness  of  vigor  acquired  by  roll- 
ing downhill  along  the  lines  of  least  re- 
sistance," "  as  if,"  he  says,  "  mental  vigor 
were  to  be  got  in  the  malarial  tracts  and 
not  on  the  windy  and  difficult  heights." 


AND   CHARACTER        113 

"Some  years  ago,"  he  adds,  "when  I 
asked  my  boy  what  he  should  like  to  do 
for  a  living,  his  answer  was :  '  I  should 
like  to  loaf  on  salary.'  As  he  has  had 
no  such  soft  elective  open  to  him,  he  is 
now  doing  very  honest  work." 

The  windy  and  difficult  heights ! 
Can  any  healthy  man  or  woman  com- 
pare the  pleasure  of  "  loafing  on  salary  " 
to  the  pleasure  of  scaling  "  the  windy 
and  difficult  heights  "  *?  Indeed,  the  cry 
of  those  who  scale  these  heights  is : 
"Give  a  boy  liberty,  and  he  too  will 
scale  them.  He  will  use  liberty  wisely, 
because  in  the  wise  use  of  it  he  will  find 
the  keenest  enjoyment  of  the  intellectual 
life."  But  a  boy,  while  he  is  a  boy,  does 
not  see  all  this.  A  student  from  a  fa- 
mous preparatory  school,  the  head  master 
of  which  is  a  vigorous  and  cultivated 
man,  knew  almost  nothing  of  the  English 
language.  "  With  the  methods  of  teach- 
ing they  have  now,"  said  his  father,  "  I 
do  not  see  how  a  boy  learns  anything. 


ii4     SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

I  really  believe,"  he  added,  "  that  the 
reason  my  boy  does  poorly  in  his  math- 
ematics is  because  he  does  not  know 
the  language  in  which  it  is  taught.  It 
would  never  occur  to  him  to  look  up  a 
word  in  the  dictionary."  This  is  the 
kind  of  boy  who  expects  in  college  that 
form  of  education  which  Mr.  Dooley 
describes  when  he  says :  "  Th'  prisidint 
takes  him  into  a  Turkish  room,  gives 
him  a  cigareet,  an'  says :  *  Me  dear  boy, 
what  special  branch  iv  larnin'  wud  ye 
like  to  have  studied  f'r  ye  be  our  com- 
pitint  professors  ? ' " l  —  the  kind  of  boy 
that  leads  the  same  philosopher  not  to 
care  what  the  children  study  so  long  as 
it  is  disagreeable  to  them. 

Now  and  then  a  man  born  of  the  best 
stock,  trained  with  the  best  training  of 
an  earlier  generation,  filled  with  high 
purpose  and  noble  enthusiasm,  fails  to 
see  that  the  average  child  of  to-day  may 
be  swamped  by  a  liberty  which  to  him 
i  The  italics  are  mine. 


AND   CHARACTER        115 

would  be  buoyant  life.  He  has  learned 
the  triumphant  happiness  of  difficult 
work  well  done,  and  forgets  the  time 
when  even  he,  in  a  school  of  to-day, 
might  not  have  learned  it.  Let  us  thank 
every  teacher  who  has  helped  us  to  see 
that,  if  we  do  anything  as  well  as  we  can 
and  keep  on  doing  it,  it  must  become 
interesting.  I  too  believe  that  boys  and 
girls  should  enjoy  education,  should  love 
the  work  of  it.  By  and  by  they  must 
spend  the  greater  part  of  their  waking 
hours  in  work  ;  and  if  they  cannot  enjoy 
work,  the  work  that  lies  before  them, 
they  will  lead  unhappy  lives.  The  late 
Professor  Dunbar  assigned  as  one  cause 
of  President  Eliot's  extraordinary  success 
his  keen  enjoyment  of  work.  Some  men 
live  on  "  the  windy  and  difficult  heights," 
mountain-climbers  by  instinct  and  by 
training ;  but  will  the  youth  of  vulgar 
heritage  and  custom-made  education 
grapple  with  the  cliffs,  or  will  he  light  a 
cigarette  and  lie  down? 


n6      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

I  am  not  attacking  the  elective  system 
in  colleges.  I  believe  with  President 
Tucker  that  "  a  considerable  amount  of 
unawakened,  uninterested  mind  in  our 
colleges  has  been  recovered  by  this  sys- 
tem ;  "  that "  it  represents  the  final  appeal 
to  the  indifferent  student ;  "  and  that  "  it 
gives  responsibility  and  stimulus  to  the 
diligent."  Yet  its  representing  the  final 
intellectual  appeal  is  a  confession  of 
weakness  in  some  early  processes.  Be- 
sides, if  the  elective  system  gets  into  the 
grammar  school,  it  will  in  some  measure 
defeat  its  own  end  in  the  college.  It 
will  cut  off  many  a  boy  from  the  liberty 
in  whose  name  it  was  created,  by  send- 
ing him  to  college  unfit  for  a  number  of 
the  elective  courses  which  would  other- 
wise be  open  to  him.  Then,  if  roused 
at  last  to  an  interest  in  work,  he  will 
"feel  the  weight"  of  the  "chance  de- 
sires "  which  led  him  blindly  away  from 
what  was  to  be  his  goal.  Suppose  he 
loves  literature,  but  not  language,  and  in 


AND   CHARACTER        117 

the  complacency  of  youth  sets  out  to  be 
a  specialist  in  literature,  with  "  no  use," 
as  he  says,  for  the  ancient  classics:  the 
higher  he  rises  in  his  specialty,  the  more 
keenly  he  will  feel  the  want  of  the  Greek 
and  Latin  which  he  might  have  mastered 
once  so  much  more  readily  than  he  can 
master  them  now.  Or,  not  to  mention 
Greek  and  Latin,  suppose  he  loves  to 
write,  but  not  to  study  grammar:  he 
may  be  clever  and  may  acquire  skill  in 
writing ;  but  the  greater  his  success,  the 
deeper  will  be  his  regret,  if  he  comes  to 
write  of  difficult  subjects,  that  he  threw 
away  the  opportunity  of  early  grammat- 
ical training. 

The  early  studies,  I  repeat,  should  be 
the  studies  that  are  at  the  root  of  all. 
These  are  the  right  studies  for  boys  whose 
book-learning  stops  with  the  grammar 
school:  they  are  equally  right  for  boys 
who  will  in  time  be  doctors  of  philoso- 
phy. In  the  hands  of  a  good  teacher 
they  are  interesting,  with  no  strain  on 


n8      SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

truth :  first,  because  to  an  awakened 
mind  every  study  has  its  charm ;  and, 
next,  because  through  them  a  good 
teacher  may  train  a  boy  to  the  enjoy- 
ment of  vigorous  work. 

I  am  talking  of  intellectual  work. 
Sewing  for  girls  and  carving  for  boys 
are  first-rate  things  and  may  well  be 
taught  in  public  institutions;  but  they 
should  not  in  an  American  grammar 
school  crowd  out  intellectual  opportu- 
nity. As  to  the  hundred  pretty  and  inter- 
esting things  with  which  we  are  tempted 
to  decorate  school  programmes,  let  us 
remember  that  "  the  foundation  must  be 
stronger  than  the  superstructure."  "  Fine 
stockings,  fine  shoes,  fine  yellow  hair," 
and  a  "  double  ruffle  round  her  neck  "  did 
not  make  up  in  Ducky  Dilver's  lamented 
wife  for  the  want  of  a  petticoat;  and 
it  is  even  so  with  frills  in  education. 
Without  the  essential  garments  of  the 
mind,  the  frills  may  become  a  mockery. 

"  I  will   tell   you,   gentlemen,"   says 


AND    CHARACTER        119 

Cardinal  Newman,  "  what  has  been  the 
practical  error  of  the  last  twenty  years 
[we  must  add  many  more  years  now]. 
Not  to  load  the  memory  of  the  student 
with  a  mass  of  undigested  knowledge ; 
but  to  force  upon  him  so  much  that  he 
has  rejected  all.  It  has  been  the  error  of 
distracting  and  enfeebling  the  mind  by 
an  unmeaning  profusion  of  subjects  ;  of 
implying  that  a  smattering  in  a  dozen 
branches  of  study  is  not  shallowness, 
which  it  really  is,  but  enlargement,  which 
it  is  not ;  of  considering  an  acquaintance 
with  the  learned  names  of  things  and 
persons,  and  the  possession  of  clever 
duodecimos,  and  attendance  on  eloquent 
lecturers,  and  membership  with  scientific 
institutions,  and  the  sight  of  the  experi- 
ments of  a  platform,  and  the  specimens 
of  a  museum,  —  that  all  this  was  not  dis- 
sipation of  mind,  but  progress.  All  things 
now  are  to  be  learned  at  once ;  not  first 
one  thing  and  then  another ;  not  one 
well,  but  many  badly.  Learning  is  to  be 


120      SCHOOL,  COLLEGE, 

without  exertion,  without  attention,  with- 
out toil,  without  grounding,  without  ad- 
vance, without  finish." 

"  There  are  youths,"  says  the  same 
great  writer,  "...  who  certainly  have  a 
taste  for  reading,  but  in  whom  it  is  little 
more  than  the  result  of  mental  restless- 
ness and  curiosity.  Such  minds  cannot 
fix  their  gaze  on  one  object  for  two  sec- 
onds together;  the  very  impulse  that 
leads  them  to  read  at  all  leads  them  to 
read  on,  and  never  to  stay  or  hang  over 
any  one  idea.  The  pleasurable  excite- 
ment of  reading  what  is  new  is  their 
motive  principle,  and  the  imagination 
that  they  are  doing  something,  and  the 
boyish  vanity  that  accompanies  it,  are 
their  reward.  Such  youths  often  profess 
to  like  poetry,  or  to  like  history  or  bio- 
graphy ;  they  are  fond  of  lectures  on  cer- 
tain of  the  physical  sciences;  or  they 
may  possibly  have  a  real  and  true  taste 
for  natural  history  or  other  cognate  sub- 
jects ;  and  so  far  they  may  be  regarded 


AND   CHARACTER        121 

with  satisfaction ;  but,  on  the  other  hand, 
they  profess  that  they  do  not  like  logic, 
they  do  not  like  algebra,  they  have  no 
taste  for  mathematics ;  which  only  means 
that  they  do  not  like  application,  they 
do  not  like  attention,  they  shrink  from 
the  effort  and  labor  of  thinking,  and  the 
process  of  true  intellectual  gymnastics. 
The  consequence  will  be  that,  when  they 
grow  up,  they  may,  if  it  so  happen,  be 
agreeable  in  conversation;  they  may  be 
well  informed  in  this  or  that  department 
of  knowledge;  they  may  be  what  is 
called  literary;  but  they  will  have  no  con- 
sistency, steadiness,  or  perseverance ;  they 
will  not  be  able  to  make  a  telling  speech, 
or  to  write  a  good  letter,  or  to  fling  in 
debate  a  smart  antagonist,  unless  so  far 
as,  now  and  then,  mother-wit  supplies  a 
sudden  capacity,  which  cannot  be  ordi- 
narily counted  on.  They  cannot  state  an 
argument  or  a  question,  or  take  a  clear 
survey  of  a  whole  transaction,  or  give 
sensible  and  appropriate  advice  under 


122      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

difficulties,  or  do  any  of  those  things 
which  inspire  confidence  and  gain  influ- 
ence, which  raise  a  man  in  life,  and  make 
him  useful  to  his  religion  or  his  country." 
Elsewhere  Cardinal  Newman  says :  — 
"The  displays  of  eloquence,  or  the 
interesting  matter  contained  in  their  lec- 
tures, the  variety  of  useful  or  entertain- 
ing knowledge  contained  in  their  libra- 
ries, though  admirable  in  themselves, 
and  advantageous  to  the  student  at  a 
later  stage  of  his  course,  never  can  serve 
as  a  substitute  for  methodical  and  labo- 
rious teaching.  A  young  man  of  sharp 
and  active  intellect,  who  has  had  no 
other  training,  has  little  to  show  for  it 
besides  a  litter  of  ideas  heaped  up  into 
his  mind  anyhow.  He  can  utter  a  num- 
ber of  truths  or  sophisms,  as  the  case  may 
be;  and  one  is  as  good  to  him  as  an- 
other. He  is  up  with  a  number  of  doc- 
trines and  a  number  of  facts ;  but  they 
are  all  loose  and  straggling,  for  he  has 
no  principles  set  up  in  his  mind  round 


AND   CHARACTER        123 

which  to  aggregate  and  locate  them. 
He  can  say  a  word  or  two  on  half  a 
dozen  sciences,  but  not  a  dozen  words 
on  any  one.  He  says  one  thing  now, 
and  another  thing  presently;  and  when 
he  attempts  to  write  down  distinctly 
what  he  holds  upon  a  point  in  dispute, 
or  what  he  understands  by  its  terms,  he 
breaks  down  and  is  surprised  at  his  fail- 
ure. He  sees  objections  more  clearly 
than  truths,  and  can  ask  a  thousand  ques- 
tions which  the  wisest  of  men  cannot 
answer;  and  withal  he  has  a  very  good 
opinion  of  himself,  and  is  well  satisfied 
with  his  attainments,  and  he  declares 
against  others,  as  opposed  to  the  spread 
of  knowledge  altogether,  who  do  not 
happen  to  adopt  his  ways  of  furthering 
it,  or  the  opinions  in  which  he  considers 
it  to  result." 

Still  again :  — 

"  But  the  intellect  which  has  been  dis- 
ciplined to  the  perfection  of  its  powers, 
which  knows,  and  thinks  while  it  knows, 


124      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

which  has  learned  to  leaven  the  dense 
mass  of  facts  and  events  with  the  elastic 
force  of  reason,  such  an  intellect  can- 
not be  partial,  cannot  be  exclusive,  can- 
not be  impetuous,  cannot  be  at  a  loss, 
cannot  but  be  patient,  collected,  and 
majestically  calm,  because  it  discerns 
the  end  in  every  beginning,  the  origin  in 
every  end,  the  law  in  every  interruption, 
the  limit  in  each  delay ;  because  it  ever 
knows  where  it  stands,  and  how  its  path 
lies  from  one  point  to  another." 

Men  look  at  any  system  of  education, 
and  are  dissatisfied,  because  no  system 
does  for  everybody  what  education 
should  do.  They  would  gather  grapes 
from  thorns  and  figs  from  thistles.  They 
forget  that  even  the  best  seed  may  fall 
on  stony  ground  or  be  eaten  by  the 
fowls  of  the  air.  They  forget  that  no 
schoolmaster  and  no  school  system  can 
make  over  a  boy's  ancestors,  or  banish 
his  temptations,  or  give  eyes  to  the 
blind  ;  and  they  have  their  visions,  their 


AND    CHARACTER        125 

theories,  their  panaceas ;  and  people  rush 
after  their  panaceas  as  people  rush  after 
other  panaceas,  to  find  that  the  pana- 
cea comes  and  goes,  while  the  disease 
abides;  and  the  steadfast  old  teacher 
almost  loses  heart,  like  the  steadfast  old 
physician  who  sees  people  stake  their 
money  and  their  lives  on  a  new  patent 
medicine,  on  irrational  healers  of  all 
sorts,  on  persons  who  prescribe  from  ex- 
amining locks  of  hair  or  from  looking 
at  the  stars;  but  by  and  by  he  says  to 
himself:  '"This,  too,  shall  pass.'  Of 
the  new  teachers  the  dishonest  will  soon 
reveal  themselves;  and  from  the  hon- 
estly mistaken  some  good  may  come. 
I  will  stand  by  a  few  things  that  I  know. 
I  know  that  it  is  better  to  concentrate 
the  mind  than  to  dissipate  it,  to  train  it 
than  to  pamper  it.  I  know  that  there  is 
no  courage  and  no  intellectual  joy  like 
the  courage  and  the  joy  of  that  effort 
which  ends  in  mastery.  New  systems 
may  come  and  go.  I  will  take  with 


i26      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

gratitude  whatever  in  any  one  of  them 
adds  beauty,  interest,  helpful  variety, 
cultivating  influence,  any  kind  of 
strength  or  glory,  to  a  task  as  perplex- 
ing as  it  is  noble :  yet  not  for  one  mo- 
ment shall  I  forget  that  sound  training 
comes  before  varied  accomplishment; 
that  there  is  no  strength  and  no  glory 
like  that  of  duty  steadily  and  bravely 
done." 


AND   CHARACTER        127 


THE  TRANSITION   FROM  SCHOOL  TO 
COLLEGE 


life  is  the  supreme  privi- 
lege  of  youth.  Rich  men's  sons 
from  private  schools  may  take  it  care- 
lessly, as  something  to  enjoy  unearned, 
like  their  own  daily  bread  ;  yet  the  true 
title  to  it  is  the  title  earned  in  college 
day  by  day.  The  privilege  of  entering 
college  admits  to  the  privilege  of  deserv- 
ing college  ;  college  life  belongs  to  the 
great  things,  at  once  joyous  and  solemn, 
that  are  not  to  be  entered  into  lightly. 

Now  the  things  that  are  not  to  be 
entered  into  lightly  (such  as  marriage 
and  the  ministry)  are  often  the  things 
that  men  enter  prepared  viciously  or  not 
prepared  at  all  ;  and  college  life  is  no 
exception.  "  There  had  always  lain  a 


128      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

pleasant  notion  at  the  back  of  his  head," 
says  Mr.  Kipling  of  Harvey  Cheyne's 
father,  who  had  left  the  boy  to  the  care 
of  a  useless  wife,  "  that  some  day,  when 
he  had  rounded  off  everything  and  the 
boy  had  left  college,  he  would  take  his 
son  to  his  heart  and  lead  him  into  his 
possessions.  Then  that  boy,  he  argued, 
as  busy  fathers  do,  would  instantly  be- 
come his  companion,  partner,  and  ally; 
and  there  would  follow  splendid  years 
of  great  works  carried  out  together, — 
the  old  head  backing  the  young  fire." 
Such  fatal  gaps  in  calculation,  common 
with  preoccupied  fathers,  are  not  un- 
common with  teachers,  —  the  very  men 
whose  lifework  is  fitting  boys  for  life. 

To  prepare  a  boy  for  examinations 
that  admit  to  college  requires  skill,  but 
is  easy ;  to  prepare  a  boy  for  college  is 
a  problem  'that  no  teacher  and  no  school 
has  ever  solved.  In  the  widest  sense,  the 
transition  from  school  to  college  is  almost 
coincident  with  the  transition  from  youth 


AND   CHARACTER        129 

to  manhood,  —  often  a  time  when  the 
physical  being  is  excitable  and  ill  con- 
trolled, when  the  mind  suffers  from  the 
lassitude  of  rapid  bodily  growth,  and 
when  the  youth's  whole  conception  of 
his  relation  to  other  people  is  distorted 
by  conceit.  Sensitive  to  his  own  impor- 
tance, just  beginning  to  know  his  power 
for  good  or  evil,  he  is  shot  into  new  and 
exciting  surroundings,  —  out  of  a  disci- 
pline that  drove  and  held  him  with  whip 
and  rein  into  a  discipline  that  trusts  him 
to  see  the  road  and  to  travel  in  it.  If 
we  add  to  this  the  new  and  alluring  argu- 
ments for  vice  as  an  expression  of  fully 
developed  manhood,  we  have  some  no- 
tion of  the  struggle  in  which  a  boy  — 
away  from  home,  it  may  be,  for  the  first 
time  —  is  expected  to  conquer.  The 
best  school  is  the  school  that  best  pre- 
pares him  for  this  struggle ;  not  the 
school  that  guards  him  most  sternly  or 
most  tenderly,  nor  the  school  that  guards 
him  not  at  all,  but  the  school  that  stead- 


130      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

ily  increases  his  responsibility,  and  as 
steadily  strengthens  him  to  meet  it  The 
best  college  is  the  college  that  makes 
him  a  man. 

The  first  feeling  of  a  Freshman  is 
confusion;  the  next  is  often  a  strange 
elation  at  the  discovery  that  now  at  last 
his  elders  have  given  him  his  head.  "  I 
never  shall  forget,"  says  a  noted  preacher, 
"  how  I  felt  when  I  found  myself  a  Fresh- 
man,—  a  feeling  that  all  restraint  was 
gone,  and  that  I  might  go  to  the  Devil 
just  as  fast  as  I  pleased."  This  is  the 
transition  from  school  to  college. 

In  a  man's  life  there  must  be,  as  every- 
body knows,  a  perilous  time  of  going  out 
into  the  world :  to  many  it  comes  at  the 
beginning  of  a  college  course;  to  many 
—  possibly  to  most  who  go  to  college  at 
all —  it  has  already  come  at  school.  The 
larger  and  less  protected  boarding  school 
or  academy  is  constantly  threatened  with 
every  vice  known  to  a  college ;  the  clois- 
tered private  school  affords,  from  its  lack 


AND    CHARACTER        131 

of  opportunity  for  some  vices,  peculiar 
temptation  to  others ;  the  day  school,  if 
in  or  near  a  large  city,  contains  boys  for 
whose  bad  habits,  not  yet  revealed,  their 
parents  by  and  by  will  hold  the  college 
responsible.  I  remember  a  group  of 
boys  going  daily  from  cultivated  homes 
to  an  excellent  school,  each  of  whom,  in 
college,  came  to  one  grief  or  another, 
and  each  of  whom,  I  am  convinced,  had 
made  straight  at  home  and  at  school  the 
way  to  that  grief.  The  transition  from 
school  to  college  was  merely  the  contin- 
uation in  a  larger  world  of  what  they 
had  begun  in  a  smaller. 

A  continuation  is  what  the  transition 
ought  to  be :  the  problem  is  how  to 
make  it  a  continuation  of  the  right  sort. 
"What  is  the  matter  with  your  col- 
lege *?  "  says  a  teacher  who  cares  beyond 
all  else  for  the  moral  and  religious  wel- 
fare of  his  pupils.  "I  keep  my  boys 
for  years :  I  send  them  to  you  in  Sep- 
tember, and  by  Christmas  half  of  them 


132      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

have  degenerated.  They  have  lost  punc- 
tuality ;  they  have  lost  application ;  they 
have  no  responsibility ;  and  some  of  them 
are  gone  to  the  bad."  "What  is  the 
matter  with  your  school,"  the  college 
retorts,  "that  in  half  a  dozen  years  it 
cannot  teach  a  boy  to  stand  up  three 
months  ?  College  is  the  world ;  fitting 
for  college  is  fitting  for  life :  what  is  the 
matter  with  your  school  ? "  He  who 
loses  his  ideals  loses  the  very  bloom  of 
life.  To  see  a  young  man's  ideals  rap- 
idly slipping  away,  while  his  face  grows 
coarser  and  coarser,  is  one  of  the  saddest 
sights  in  college  or  out  of  it.  What 
is  his  training  good  for,  if  it  has  not 
taught  him  the  folly,  the  misery,  and  the 
wrong  of  dabbling  in  evil  ?  If  he  must 
believe  that  no  man  is  wise  till  he  has 
come  to  know  the  resorts  of  gamblers 
and  harlots,  and  has  indulged  himself 
for  experience'  sake  in  a  little  gentle- 
manly vice,  can  he  not  put  off  the  ac- 
quaintance four  years  more,  by  the  end 


AND    CHARACTER        133 

of  which  time  he  may  have  learned 
some  wiser  way  of  getting  wisdom? 
Besides,  in  the  course  of  those  four 
years  (and  the  chance  is  better  than 
even)  he  may  meet  some  girl  for  whose 
sake  he  will  be  glad  that  his  record  has 
been  clean.  Cannot  a  school  which 
closely  watches  its  boys  while  their 
characters  are  moulding  teach  them  to 
keep  their  heads  level  and  their  hearts 
true,  save  them  from  the  wrong  that 
never  can  be  righted,  send  them  to  col- 
lege and  through  college,  faulty  it  must 
be,  but  at  least  unstained  ? 

The  main  object  of  school  and  college 
is  the  same,  —  to  establish  character,  and 
to  make  that  character  more  efficient 
through  knowledge;  to  make  moral 
character  more  efficient  through  mental 
discipline.  In  the  transition  from  school 
to  college,  continuity  of  the  best  influ- 
ence, mental  and  moral,  is  the  thing 
most  needful.  Oddly  enough,  the  only 
continuity  worthy  of  the  name  is  often 


134     SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

(in  its  outward  aspect)  neither  mental 
nor  moral,  but  athletic.  An  athlete  is 
watched  at  school  as  an  athlete,  enters 
college  as  an  athlete;  and  if  he  is  a 
good  athlete,  and  if  he  takes  decent  care 
of  his  body,  he  continues  his  college 
course  as  an  athlete,  —  with  new  expe- 
riences, it  is  true,  but  always  with  the 
thread  of  continuity  fairly  visible,  and 
with  the  relation  of  training  to  success 
clearly  in  view.  Palpably  bad  as  the 
management  of  college  athletics  has 
been  and  is,  misleading  as  the  predomi- 
nance of  athletics  in  an  institution  of 
learning  may  be,  the  fact  remains  that 
in  athletics  lies  a  saving  power,  and  that 
for  many  a  boy  no  better  bridge  of  the 
gap  between  school  and  college  has  yet 
been  found.  The  Freshman  athlete,  left 
to  himself,  is  likely  to  fall  behind  in  his 
studies ;  but  unless  he  is  singularly  un- 
reasonable or  vicious,  he  is  where  an 
older  student  of  clear  head  and  strong 
will  can  keep  him  straight,  —  can  at 


AND   CHARACTER       135 

least  save  him  from  those  deplorable 
falls  that,  to  a  greater  or  less  degree, 
bruise  and  taint  a  whole  life.  "The 
trouble  will  begin,"  said  a  wise  man, 
talking  to  sub-Freshmen,  "in  the  first 
fortnight.  Some  evening  you  will  be 
with  a  lot  of  friends  in  somebody's 
room,  when  something  is  proposed  that 
you  know  is  n't  just  right.  Stop  it  if 
you  can ;  if  not,  go  home  and  go  to  bed, 
and  in  the  morning  you  will  be  glad  you 
did  n't  stay."  The  first  danger  in  the 
transition  from  boyhood  to  manhood  is 
the  danger  in  what  is  called  "  knowing 
life."  It  is  so  easy  to  let  mere  vulgar 
curiosity  pose  as  the  search  for  truth. 
A  Senior  who  had  been  in  a  fight  at  a 
public  dance  said  in  defence  of  himself: 
"  I  think  I  have  led  a  pretty  clean  life 
in  these  four  years ;  but  I  believe  that 
going  among  all  sorts  of  people  and 
knowing  them  is  the  best  thing  college 
life  can  give  us."  The  old  poet  knew 
better :  — 


136      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

"Let  no  man  say  there,  'Virtue's  flinty  wall 
Shall  lock  vice  in  me  ;  I  '11  do  none  but  know  all.' 

Men  are  sponges,  which,  to  pour  out,  receive  ; 
Who  know  false  play,  rather  than  lose,  deceive  ; 

For  in  best  understandings  sin  began  ; 

Angels  sinned  first,  then  devils,  and  then  man." 

Here  comes  in  to  advantage  the  am- 
bition of  the  athlete.  Football  begins 
with  or  before  the  college  year.  Train- 
ing for  football  means  early  hours,  clean 
life,  constant  occupation  for  body  and 
mind.  Breach  of  training  means  ostra- 
cism. That  this  game  tides  many  a 
Freshman  over  a  great  danger,  by  keep- 
ing him  healthily  occupied,  I  have  come 
firmly  to  believe.  It  supplies  what  Pre- 
sident Eliot  calls  a  "new  and  effective 
motive  for  resisting  all  sins  which  weaken 
or  corrupt  the  body;"  it  appeals  to 
ambition  and  to  self-restraint;  it  gives 
to  crude  youth  a  task  in  which  crude 
youth  can  attain  finish  and  skill,  can 
feel  the  power  that  comes  of  surmount- 
ing tremendous  obstacles  and  of  recog- 


AND   CHARACTER        137 

nition  for  surmounting  them  ;  moreover, 
like  war,  it  affords  an  outlet  for  the  reck- 
less courage  of  young  manhood,  —  the 
same  reckless  courage  that  in  idle  days 
drives  young  men  headlong  into  vice. 

Has  not  hard  study,  also,  a  saving 
power  *?  Yes,  for  some  boys  ;  but  for  a 
boy  full  of  animal  spirits,  and  not  spurred 
to  intellectual  effort  by  poverty,  the  pres- 
sure is  often  too  gentle,  the  reward  too 
remote.  Such  a  youth  may  be,  in  the 
first  place,  too  well  pleased  with  himself 
to  understand  his  relation  to  his  fellow 
men  and  the  respectability  of  labor.  He 
may  fail  to  see  that  college  life  does  not 
of  itself  make  a  man  distinguished ;  in 
a  vague  way,  he  feels  that  the  university 
is  gratefully  ornamented  by  his  presence. 
No  human  creature  can  be  more  com- 
placent than  a  Freshman,  unless  it  is  a 
Sophomore :  yet  the  Freshman  may  be 
simply  a  being  who,  with  no  particular 
merit  of  his  own,  has  received  a  great 
opportunity;  and  the  Sophomore  may 


138      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

be  simply  a  being  who  has  abused  that 
opportunity  for  a  year. 

Now  the  Freshman  meets,  in  a  large 
modern  college,  a  new  theory  of  intel- 
lectual discipline.  As  Professor  Peabody 
has  beautifully  expressed  it,  he  passes 
"  from  the  sense  of  study  as  an  obligation 
to  the  sense  of  study  as  an  opportunity." 
Too  often  he  regards  study  as  an  inferior 
opportunity ;  and  having  an  option  be- 
tween study  and  loafing,  he  takes  loafing. 
"In  the  Medical  School,"  said  a  first- 
year  medical  student,  "  they  give  you  a 
lot  to  do ;  and  nobody  cares  in  the  least 
whether  you  do  it."  In  other  words,  the 
Medical  School  may  rely  on  the  com- 
bined stimulus  of  intellectual  ambition 
and  bread  and  butter :  its  Faculty  need 
not  prod  or  cosset ;  it  is  a  place  of  Devil 
take  the  hindmost.  Yet  the  change  in 
the  attitude  of  teacher  to  pupil  is  not 
more  sharply  marked  between  college 
and  medical  school  than  between  prepar- 
atory school  and  college.  "  There  are 


AND    CHARACTER        139 

only  two  ways  of  getting  work  out  of 
a  boy"  said  a  young  college  graduate. 
"  One  is  through  emulation ;  the  other 
is  to  stand  behind  and  kick  him.1  Mr. 
X  [a  well-known  schoolmaster]  says, 
'  Jones,  will  you  please  do  this  or  that ; ' 
Mr.  Y  stands  behind  Jones  and  kicks 
him  into  college."  I  do  not  accept  the 
young  graduate's  alternative ;  but  I  have 
to  admit  that  many  boys  are  kicked,  or 
whipped,  or  cosseted,  or  otherwise  per- 
sonally conducted  into  college,  and,  once 
there,  are  as  hopelessly  lost  as  a  baby 
turned  loose  in  London.  "  It  took  me 
about  two  years  in  college  to  get  my 
bearings,"  said  an  earnest  man,  now  a 
superintendent  of  schools.  "I  didn't 
loaf;  I  simply  did  n't  know  how  to  get 
at  things.  In  those  days  there  was  no- 
body to  go  to  for  advice;  and  I  had 
never  read  anything,  —  had  never  been 
inside  of  a  public  library.  I  did  n't 
know  where  or  how  to  take  hold." 

1  Both  ways  are  known  in  football,  besides  what 
is  called  "  cursing  up." 


140      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

This  is  the  story  of  a  man  who  longed 
to  take  hold;  and  we  must  remember 
that  many  of  our  college  boys  do  not  at 
first  care  whether  they  take  hold  or  not. 
It  is  only  in  football,  not  in  study,  that 
they  have  learned  to  tackle,  and  to  tackle 
low.  "  A  bolstered  boy,"  says  a  wise  mo- 
ther, "  is  an  unfortunate  man."  Many  of 
these  boys  have  been  bolstered ;  many 
are  mothers'  boys;  many  have  crammed 
day  and  night  through  the  hot  season  to 
get  into  college,  and,  once  in,  draw  a 
long  breath  and  lie  down.  The  main 
object  of  life  is  attained ;  and  for  any 
secondary  object  they  are  too  tired  to 
work.  The  old  time-table  of  morning 
school  gives  place  to  a  confusing  arrange- 
ment which  spreads  recitations  and  lec- 
tures unevenly  over  the  different  days. 
They  walk  to  a  large  lecture  room,  where 
a  man  who  is  not  going  to  question  them 
that  day  talks  for  an  hour,  more  or  less 
audibly.  He  is  a  long  way  off;1  and 

1  A  student  whose  name  begins  with  Y  told  me 
once  that  he  had  never  had  a  good  seat  in  his  life. 


AND   CHARACTER        141 

though  he  is  talking  to  somebody,  he 
seems  not  to  be  talking  to  them.  It  is 
hard  to  listen ;  and  if  they  take  notes  (a 
highly  educational  process)  the  notes  will 
be  poor  :  besides,  if  they  need  notes,  they 
can  buy  them  later.  Why  not  let  the 
lecture  go,  and  sleep,  or  carve  the  furni- 
ture, or  think  about  something  else  (girls, 
for  instance)  ?  These  boys  are  in  a  poor 
frame  of  mind  for  new  methods  of  in- 
struction ;  yet  new  methods  of  instruc- 
tion they  must  have.  They  must  learn 
to  depend  upon  themselves,  to  become 
men ;  and  they  must  learn  that  hardest 
lesson  of  all,  —  that  a  man's  freedom 
consists  in  binding  himself:  still  again, 
they  must  learn  these  things  at  an  age 
when  the  average  boy  has  an  ill-seasoned 
body,  a  half-trained  mind,  jarred  nerves, 
his  first  large  sum  of  money,  all  manner 
of  diverting  temptations,  and  a  profound 
sense  of  his  own  importance.  How  can 
they  be  taken  down,  and  not  taken  down 
too  much,  —  thrown,  and  not  thrown  too 


142      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

hard  ?  How  can  they  be  taught  the  re- 
sponsibility of  freedom  *?  They  face,  it 
may  be,  an  elective  system  which,  at  first 
sight,  seems  to  make  elective,  not  this  or 
that  study  merely,  but  the  habit  of  study- 
ing at  all.  Already  they  have  been  weak- 
ened by  the  failure  of  the  modern  parent 
and  the  modern  educator  to  see  steadily 
the  power  that  is  born  of  overcoming 
difficulties.  What  the  mind  indolently 
shrinks  from  is  readily  mistaken,  by  fond 
mothers,  mercenary  tutors,  and  some  bet- 
ter people,  as  not  suited  to  the  genius  of 
the  boy  in  question.  "  It  is  too  much 
for  Jamie  to  learn  those  stupid  rules  of 
syntax,  when  he  has  a  passion  for  natural 
history ;  "  or,  "  George  never  could  learn 
geometry,  —  and  after  all,  we  none  of  us 
use  geometry  in  later  life.  He  expects 
to  be  a  lawyer,  like  his  father ;  and  I 
can't  think  of  any  good  geometry  can 
do  him." 

The  change  "from  the  sense  of  study 
as  an  obligation  to  the  sense  of  study  as 


AND    CHARACTER        143 

an  opportunity"  is  a  noble  change  for 
persons  mature  enough  to  turn  oppor- 
tunity into  obligation  :  it  is  not  a  noble 
change  for  those  who  choose  such  studies 
only  as  they  think  they  can  pass  with 
bought  notes.  Knowledge  that  does  not 
overcome  difficulties,  knowledge  that 
merely  absorbs  what  it  can  without  dis- 
agreeable effort,  is  not  power;  it  is  not 
even  manly  receptivity.  Milton,  to  be 
sure,  patient  toiler  and  conqueror  though 
he  was,  cried  in  his  pain,  "  God  loves  not 
to  plough  out  the  heart  of  our  endeavors 
with  overhard  and  sad  tasks : "  but  an 
overhard  and  sad  task  may  be  a  plain 
duty ;  and  even  Milton,  when  he  said 
this,  was  trying  to  get  rid  of  what  some 
people  would  call  a  plain  duty,  —  his 
wife.  When  we  consider  the  mass  and 
the  variety  of  the  Freshmen's  tempta- 
tions, and  what  some  one  has  called  the 
"  strain  on  their  higher  motives,"  we 
wonder  more  and  more  at  the  strength  of 
the  temptation  to  knowledge,  whereby  so 


144      SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

many  stand  steady,  and  work  their  way 
out  into  clear-headed  and  trustworthy 
manhood. 

One  way  to  deal  with  these  strange, 
excited,  inexperienced,  and  intensely  hu- 
man things  called  Freshmen  is  to  let  thern 
flounder  till  they  drown  or  swim ;  and 
this  way  has  been  advocated  by  men  who 
have  no  boys  of  their  own.  It  is  de- 
lightfully simple,  if  we  can  only  shut  eye 
and  ear  and  heart  and  conscience ;  and 
it  has  a  kind  of  plausibility  in  the  ex- 
amples of  men  who  through  rough  usage 
have  achieved  strong  character.  "  The 
objection,"  as  the  master  of  a  great  school 
said  the  other  day,  "  is  the  waste  ;  and," 
he  added,  "  it  is  such  an  awful  thing  to 
waste  human  life ! "  This  method  is  a 
cruel  method,  ignoring  all  the  sensibili- 
ties of  that  delicate,  high-strung  instru- 
ment which  we  call  the  soul.  If  none 
but  the  fittest  survived,  the  cruelty  might 
be  defended ;  but  some,  who  unhappily 
cannot  drown,  become  cramped  swim- 


AND    CHARACTER        145 

mers  for  all  their  days.  Busy  and  worn 
as  a  college  teacher  usually  is,  thirsty 
for  the  advancement  of  learning  as  he 
is  assumed  always  to  be,  he  cannot  let 
hundreds  of  young  men  pass  before  him, 
unheeded  and  unfriended.  At  Harvard 
College,  the  Faculty,  through  its  system 
of  advisers  for  Freshmen,  has  made  a 
beginning :  and  though  there  are  hardly 
enough  advisers  to  go  round,  the  system 
has  proved  its  usefulness.  At  Harvard 
College,  also,  a  large  committee  of 
Seniors  and  Juniors  has  assumed  some 
responsibility  for  all  the  Freshmen.  Each 
undertakes  to  see  at  the  beginning  of 
the  year  the  Freshmen  assigned  to  him, 
and  to  give  every  one  of  them,  besides 
kindly  greeting  and  good  advice,  the 
feeling  that  an  experienced  undergradu- 
ate may  be  counted  on  as  a  friend  in 
need. 

Whether  colleges  should  guard  their 
students  more  closely  than  they  do  — 
whether,  for  example,  they  should  with 


146     SCHOOL,   COLLEGE, 

gates  and  bars  protect  their  dormitories 
against  the  inroads  of  bad  women  —  is 
an  open  question.  For  the  deliberately 
vicious  such  safeguards  would  amount 
to  nothing ;  but  for  the  weak  they  might 
lessen  the  danger  of  sudden  temptation. 
Of  what  schools  should  do  I  can  say 
little  ;  for  with  schools  I  have  little  expe- 
rience :  but  this  I  know,  that  some  sys- 
tem of  gradually  increased  responsibility 
is  best  in  theory,  and  has  proved  good  in 
practice.  The  scheme  of  making  the 
older  and  more  influential  boys  "  pre- 
fects" has  worked  well  in  at  least  one 
large  preparatory  school,  and  shows  its 
excellence  in  the  attitude  of  the  prefects 
when  they  come  to  college.  This  scheme 
makes  a  confident  appeal  to  the  maturity 
of  some  boys  and  the  reasonableness  of 
all,  trusting  all  to  see  that  the  best  hopes 
of  teacher  and  scholar  are  one  and  the 
same. 

The   system  of  gradually   increased 


AND   CHARACTER       147 

responsibility  at  school  must  be  met  half- 
way by  the  system  of  friendly  supervision 
at  college,  —  supervision  in  which  the 
older  undergraduates  are  quite  as  impor- 
tant as  the  Faculty.  The  Sophomore  who 
enjoys  hazing  (like  the  dean  who  em- 
ploys spies)  is  an  enemy  to  civilization. 
The  true  state  of  mind,  whether  for  pro- 
fessor or  for  student,  was  expressed  by 
a  college  teacher  long  ago.  "  I  hold  it," 
he  said,  "  a  part  of  my  business  to  do 
what  I  can  for  any  wight  that  comes  to 
this  place."  When  all  students  of  all 
colleges,  and  all  boys  of  all  schools,  be- 
lieve, and  have  the  right  to  believe,  that 
their  teachers  are  their  friends ;  when 
the  educated  public  recognizes  the  truth 
that  school  and  college  should  help  each 
other  in  lifting  our  youth  to  the  high 
ground  of  character,  —  the  school  never 
forgetting  that  boys  are  to  be  men,  and 
the  college  never  forgetting  that  men 
have  been  boys,  —  we  shall  come  to  the 


148  CHARACTER 

ideal  of  education.  Toward  this  ideal  we 
are  moving,  slowly  but  steadily.  When 
we  reach  it,  or  even  come  so  near  it  as 
to  see  it  always,  we  shall  cease  to  dread 
the  transition  from  school  to  college. 


Che  ttilirrsi&r  press 

Eltctrotyped  and  printed  by  H.  O.  Houghton  &•  Co. 
Cambridge,  Mass.,  U.  S.  A. 


This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


TO  FINE  IF 

DUCATION 


NOT  RETURNED  TO 

JBRARY 


APR  2  3  1940 
1  2  1962 


Form  L-9-35w-8,'28 


UCLA-ED/PSYCH  Library 

LB2319B76 


L  005  582  864  4 


Education 
Library 

LB 

2319 
B?6 


JS^SiMRN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY 


UNIVERSITY  of  CALIFORN1 
AT 

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IJBRARY 


